Editing One Thousand and One Nights (section)

===In Arab culture===
There is little evidence that the ''Nights'' was particularly treasured in the Arab world. It is rarely mentioned in lists of popular literature and few pre-18th-century manuscripts of the collection exist.<ref>Reynolds p. 272</ref> Fiction had a low cultural status among Medieval Arabs compared with poetry, and the tales were dismissed as ''khurafa'' (improbable fantasies fit only for entertaining women and children). According to Robert Irwin, "Even today, with the exception of certain writers and academics, the ''Nights'' is regarded with disdain in the Arabic world. Its stories are regularly denounced as vulgar, improbable, childish and, above all, badly written".{{sfn|Irwin|2004|pp=81–82}}

Nevertheless, the ''Nights'' have proved an inspiration to some modern Egyptian writers, such as [[Tawfiq al-Hakim]] (author of the [[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolist]] play ''Shahrazad'', 1934), [[Taha Hussein]] (''Scheherazade's Dreams'', 1943)<ref name="Encyclopaedia Iranica">{{cite web|url=http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/alf-layla-wa-layla |title=Encyclopaedia Iranica |publisher=Iranicaonline.org |access-date=2013-10-18}}</ref> and [[Naguib Mahfouz]] (''[[Arabian Nights and Days]]'', 1979). [[Idries Shah]] finds the [[Abjad numerals|Abjad]] numerical equivalent of the Arabic title, ''alf layla wa layla'', in the Arabic phrase ''ʾumm al-qiṣṣa'', meaning 'mother of stories'. He goes on to state that many of the stories "are encoded [[Sufi]] [[teaching stories]], descriptions of psychological processes, or enciphered lore of one kind or another".<ref name="Sufis">{{cite book|last=Shah|first=Idries|title=The Sufis|publisher=Octagon Press|orig-date=1964|year=1977|location=London, UK|pages=174–175|isbn=0-86304-020-9}}</ref>

On a more popular level, film and TV adaptations based on stories like Sinbad and Aladdin enjoyed long lasting popularity in Arabic speaking countries.

{{Anchor|Possible early influence on European literature}}