Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

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Ali Baba by Maxfield Parrish (1909).

Ali Baba (Arabic: علي بابا) is a fictional character described in the adventure tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, part of the Thousand and One Nights. Some critics believe that this story was added to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights by one of its European transcribers, Antoine Galland, an 18th-century French orientalist who may have heard it in oral form from an Arab story-teller from Aleppo. However, Richard F. Burton claimed it to be part of the original Book of One Thousand and One Nights. This story has also been used as a popular pantomime plot—perhaps most famously in the pantomime/musical Chu Chin Chow (1916).

Baba (بابا) is a Persian word meaning "dad", later adopted by other languages of the region, such as Arabic and Turkish. Template:Spoiler

Story

Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter, happens to overhear a group of thieves—forty in all—visiting their treasure store in the forest where he is cutting wood. The thieves' treasure is in a cave, the mouth of which is sealed by magic—it opens on the words "Open, Sesame", and seals itself on the words "Close, Sesame". When the thieves are gone, Ali Baba enters the cave himself, and takes some of the treasure home.

Ali Baba's rich brother, Cassim, finds out about his brother's unexpected wealth, and Ali Baba tells Cassim about the cave. Cassim goes to the cave to take more of the treasure, but in his greed and excitement over the treasures forgets the magic words to get back out of the cave. The thieves find him there, and kill him. When his brother does not come back, Ali Baba goes to the cave to look for him, and finds the body, bringing it home. With the help of Morgiana, a clever slave-girl in Cassim's household, they are able to give Cassim a proper burial without arousing any suspicions about his death.

The thieves, finding the body gone, realize that somebody else must know their secret, and set out to track him down. The first several times they are foiled by Morgiana, who is now a member of Ali Baba's household, but eventually they are able to ascertain the location of Ali Baba's house.

The lead thief pretends to be an oil merchant in need of Ali Baba's hospitality, bringing with him mules loaded with thirty-eight oil jars, one filled with oil, the other thirty-seven with the other thieves (the two missing members were the scouts previously sent to find the house, who were killed for their failure). Once Ali Baba is asleep, the thieves plan to kill him. Again, Morgiana discovers and foils the plan, killing the thirty-seven thieves in their oil jars by pouring boiling oil on them. When their leader comes to rouse his men, he discovers that they are dead, and escapes.

To exact revenge, after some time the lead thief establishes himself as a merchant, befriends Ali Baba's son (who is now in charge of the late Cassim's business), and is invited to dinner at Ali Baba's house. The thief is recognised by Morgiana, who performs a dance with a dagger for the diners and plunges it into the heart of the thief when he is off his guard. Ali Baba gives Morgiana her freedom and she marries his son. Thus, the story ends happily for everyone except the forty thieves and Cassim.

The story has its base in a Sudanese saga of king Ali Baba of the Bija tribe (inhabited near Port Sudan). The king refused to pay the taxes to Al-Mutawakkil, the tenth Abbassi caliph in Baghdad. The rebel king sealed all gold mines in the mountains and stopped central officials from going to the whole Red Sea area. Baghdad did send its army in to keep its power upon the vital gold market in the Islamic world (it's believed that Sudan provided more than sixty percent of the Abbassi gold in the pre-crusade era) and within five years it managed to crush the rebellion. Ali Baba, taken to Baghdad, carried all the gold hidden by his men to the caliph. A public display of the great treasure and the defeated king was shown in all important cities in the road to the capital Samarra creating the legend of the caves and the legend of the thieves. In the end, Ali Baba was granted amnesty in Samarra and upon his return he gave gold to the needy in all major towns in the road as a good gesture to the muslims whom he fought.

Iraq War

• The name Ali Baba was often used as derogatory slang by Americans Soldiers and their allies in the War in Iraq to describe individuals suspected of a variety of offenses related to theft and looting. In the subsequent occupation it is used as a general term for the Iraqis, similar to "Hajji," or Charlie for the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War.

• Due to interaction of the two peoples, the term Ali Baba was adopted by the Iraqis to describe foreign troops suspected of looting, and the English-speaking mainstream press mistakenly reported the slang to be native to the locals.

In other media

• The concept of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was used for the last installment of Disney's Aladdin series, Aladdin and the King of Thieves

• In the videogame Sonic and the Secret Rings, Miles "Tails" Prower is Ali Baba. Despite the fact that the forty thieves appear in the game as spirits and reanimated skeletons, he has no involvement with them at all.

• The story was made into a Tamil movie in 1955 as "Alibabhavum Narpathu Thirudargalum" (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) with M.G.Ramachandran playing the lead as Ali Baba and Bhanumathi Ramakrishna as Morgiana.

• A Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon has a similar premise to the concept of the treasure-filled magical cave, in which Daffy Duck is consumed by the same greed as Cassim.

• Akon makes reference to Ali Baba in the song Never Gonna Get It

External links

• "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (e-text, in English)
• Waller Hastings, "Ali Baba and the forty Thieves": essay
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and the Arabian Nights at the Internet Movie Database