“Shahryar: She may not be a woman. Who is she? I ask you, who is she! She is the prisoner in her chamber all her life, yet she knows everything on earth as if she were the earth itself! She is the one who never left her grove, yet she knows Egypt, India, and China! She is the virgin who knows men like a woman who has lived a thousand years among men, and she understands the nature of humankind, both noble and base\u2026”<\/p>\n
In contrast to the dazzling brilliance of the tales in “One Thousand and One Nights,” Tawfiq al-Hakim surprises us in his play with the state of confusion and bewilderment that King Shahryar finds himself in after Scheherazade absolves him of the guilt of his first wife’s betrayal and awakens in him this insatiable thirst for knowledge. Shahryar is caught in a struggle between his conflicting impulses; He decides to leave in search of truth, believing he has been afflicted with the same wanderlust as Sinbad. But he returns to Scheherazade, who here becomes a symbol of all-encompassing, all-knowing wisdom, one that does not reveal itself or divulge its secrets to anyone. Ultimately, we realize that a person cannot live in pure intellect, nor can they abandon life without life itself dying within them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This symbolic play revolves around a journey in search of truth and knowledge after the conclusion of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights. The protagonist enters into a conflict between reason and emotion, confronting fundamental questions of existence, life, and humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":27738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[949,940,919,921,834],"product_tag":[2728,1276,1359,1343],"class_list":["post-27740","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-general-literature","product_cat-arabic-literature","product_cat-literary-plays","product_cat-literary-texts","product_cat-philosophy","product_tag-literature","product_tag-myths","product_tag-philosophy","product_tag-thought","pa_book-author-tawfiq-al-hakim","first","onbackorder","sale","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/27740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=27740"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=27740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}