Secrets of the Arabian Nights

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History Documentary hosted by Richard E Grant, published by BBC in 2011 - English narration

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The Arabian Nights arrived in the West 300 years ago and its stories have entranced generations of children and seduced adults with a vision of an exotic, magical Middle East. Richard E Grant wants to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination. He travels to Paris to discover how the stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin were first brought to the West by the pioneering Arabist Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. The Nights became an overnight literary sensation and were translated into all the major European languages. In Cairo, Richard explores the medieval Islamic world which first created them and finds that some of the stories are still controversial because of their sexually-explicit content. Richard meets the Egyptian writer Gamal al Ghitani, who received death threats when he published a new edition of the book, and finds that the ribald and riotous stories in the Nights represent a very different view of Islam than fundamentalism.