With Odysseus’s
adventure with Polyphemus out of the way, we’re wide open for something really
interesting. We’ll segue into Sinbad the Sailor, who is famous for having his
own adventures. We’ll skip his first and second voyages, going straight for the
third. Why? Simple, we know this story. If you don’t have your own copy of the
1 Nights, you can read
Sinbad’s third here.
Sinbad’s
third adventure finds him restless, as usual, and soon shipwrecked, also as
usual, on an island. This island is home to an evil giant that will eat the
crew. It is up to Sinbad to come up with a cunning plan to blind the giant
using to spears after heating them—
Wait! Come
back! No, really, this is the story, and, yes, I know it’s a direct plagiarism
of The Odyssey. If this were modern
day and Homer were alive, he would be suing . . . well, we don’t know who wrote
Sinbad—they weren’t even part of the original Arabian Nights—but Homer would sue somebody.
So, yes,
it’s a direct rip off. There’s no way around it. It’s easier to count the
differences than the similarities with this one. For one, there’s a castle
instead of a cave, the giant has two eyes instead of one, there are no sheep
anywhere, and there are some ill-tempered apes in Sinbad.
Those are
all superficial, though. There is one overriding difference that really makes
this important, and that’s the inclusion of Allah, who is repeatedly attributed
in the story. Though the deity never makes an appearance, it’s clear that all
the characters in the story feel a great reverence and faith in God.
This is
big. This is the—wait, no, better add
more emphasis—THE difference between Odysseus’s story and Sinbad’s.
It’s a complete inversion of the story, but for the same purpose, oddly enough.
Okay, at
its core, Odysseus and Polyphemus were about respect for the gods. Odysseus had
it, the Cyclopes didn’t. Polyphemus is punished for this by Odysseus—ostensibly
at the behest of Zeus due to a prophetic loophole.
Sinbad’s story,
though, is also about respect for God, but told in a different manner. Because
Sinbad and the other sailors show reverence and respect to Allah, their actions
are blessed (though there are no direct interventions), and they are able to
escape.
There’s no
denying the similarities of the stories. The question then becomes, who copied
who? Okay, it’s not really much of a question. A quick Google search will turn
up the results that these stories are separated by well over a thousand years,
with Sinbad written later. Now the question is why? If Muslims had access to
Odysseus, why create Sinbad? Why not just keep Odysseus’s story? Clearly, they
thought it a good story if they copied it. Patience, Grasshopper. Next week
we’ll dig in.