Should we be reading The Nights is a very great question to answer. We were warned before we even read the prologue. This does not come off with a good first impression if we as students need to be warned about the reading we are about to encounter. However, we first need to inform ourselves about the book. We all know this book is very old, and that the stories from inside the book have been going around for centuries before our time here on earth. The things that people did and the social norms are completely different from what is happening now. Times have changed and progressed toward the better so of course we are going to think things were worse back then.
It is also great to read this. Throughout my childhood schooling when the history teacher would say
“What is the purpose of learning history?” The first response would always be
“So history does not repeat itself.” This is the first instinct I got when reading this. There was a lot of misconduct sexually and racially in this text. That would not be something that would happen in todays standards of living in our society. If it did the person would either not be a free man and be locked away for a long time or face the death sentence immediately. Now we know that our society has progressed and moved on to the better. It is like looking at your younger self and cringing and being embarrassed at what you used to do. That’s good because you evolved grew up and matured from when you were younger. Like from this book to now our society got better, these killings would never happen without punishment. For these reasons I believe it is good to read it for us to realize how good the life we live is and how much better we have it than previous generations.
I can also see how this can be bad to read. There are many false stereotypes in this prologue. The first and general idea that we get of Arabs is that they are totally violent, love to kill, and sexually assault women. There was nothing about their actual core values and good things about them. This is not accurate. Any person of Arab decent could feel totally offended by this and give a negative connotation of what their ancestors were truly like, even though this is not the case.
This book let’s say is a very interesting one. There are many things to react to in different ways. Whether it be random text that is funny or hurtful and negative stereotypes that could possibly hurt feelings. There can be many reasons to read and to not read The Nights.
