The One Thousand and One Nights

 In The One Thousand and One Nights, the story discusses how woman are betraying their husbands. In one instance Shahrayar’s wife is caught cheating with a slave. She is able to get away with this by using the veil that woman are told to wear in their society. Woman are told to wear the veils to cover up their beauty in public, however women realized to use this belief in their favor. In The One Thousand and One Nights the woman are shown as using their veils to cover up their identity and provide them with freedom. It is very hard to tell woman apart when they are completely covered up and this makes it very easy to secure their identity. Shahrayar’s wife uses her veil to make herself blend in with the slave girls and the men they are sleeping with wear the veils to make them appear to be slave girls as well. The Thousand and One Nights says, “…[A]nd there emerged, strutting like a dark-eyes deer, the lady, his brother’s wife, with twenty slave-girls, ten white and ten black. … Then they sat down, took off their clothes, and suddenly there were ten slave-girls and ten black slaves dressed in the same clothes as the girls” (B,410). After Shahrayar sees what is going on he decides to never trust a woman again. He comes up with a plan to sleep with a new girl every night and then put them to death. That way they will not be able to sleep with anyone else. This is Shahrayar’s attempt to control woman.
 In the New York Time’s, recently there was an article, Google Sees Rules Violations in Limits on Internet Access. This article discusses how China, and other countries, are attempting to control the internet by blocking what people are allowed to access. The internet, since it was created, always provided freedom. Users are able to access any site and are able to obtain any information they are looking for. Some people used the internet to cover up their identity because anybody can be whoever they would like to be online. Also there are many websites now with information that users are allowed to put up, like Wikipedia. The freedom on the internet is endless, or so it was. Now Google is saying that government is attempting to control the internet by blocking what users are allowed to do. The article states, “The Google policy paper said that more than 40 governments around the world now to some extent restrict freedom of information on the Internet — which it said was more than a tenfold increase in the last decade of governments with such restrictions.” Most of the governments that want to go about this are from the East. Google is arguing that blocking the free flow of information on the internet is against human rights and will block economic growth. This article is similar to the story, The One Thousand and One Nights because as woman are using the veils to allow themselves freedom, the internet has provided users with freedom. Now the government, similar to Shahrayar, is attempting to control the rights given to people, or these women. The government is attempting to use censorship to control internet uses, and Shahrayar is killing women, so that they will have absolutely no freedom after him.

This entry was posted in The Thousand and One Nights. Bookmark the permalink.