The Sleeper Awakened

Also known as Abu Hassan

• 4 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Alif Laila Stories

Abu Hassan lived in Baghdad and had one rule about guests: he would invite a stranger to dinner once, treat him magnificently, and then never see him again.

He had worked out that friendships in Baghdad cost money and ended badly, and that one good evening with someone you would never meet twice was the best value available.

So every evening he sat on the bridge and picked a traveller.

The stranger

One night the traveller he picked was the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who liked to walk the city in ordinary clothes to hear what people actually said.

The Caliph accepted the invitation and had an extremely good evening.

Late on, he asked Abu Hassan what he would do if he could do anything.

Abu Hassan, who had had some wine, told him.

There were four men in his district — the imam of his mosque and three of his neighbours — who made everyone's life a misery, interfering and reporting and complaining and generally ruining the street. If Abu Hassan were Caliph for one day, he said, he would deal with all four before lunch and then go home.

The Caliph asked several questions about the four men, which Abu Hassan answered in detail, and then dropped something into his cup while he was not looking.

Waking up

Abu Hassan woke in the Caliph's bed in the Caliph's palace, wearing the Caliph's robes, with the entire court kneeling and calling him Commander of the Faithful.

He assumed he was dreaming. He said so, several times, and people kept agreeing that he was the Caliph, which is exactly what a dream would do.

So he decided that if this was a dream he would use it.

He held court. He heard petitions. He gave orders about the price of bread and about a bridge that needed repairing, and every order was carried out at once and carried out correctly, because he knew that district better than anyone in the room.

Then he sent for the imam and the three neighbours and dealt with all four before lunch, exactly as he had said.

And that evening he was given wine, and went to sleep, and woke up in his own house in his own clothes.

The trouble with that

Nobody believed him.

His mother told him he had dreamed it. He insisted. She insisted back. It went on for some days and got worse, and it ended with Abu Hassan being taken to the asylum, where he stayed for a fortnight and was treated fairly badly.

When he came out he had decided the whole thing had been a dream after all, and had stopped mentioning it, and had gone back to sitting on the bridge.

And a traveller came past who looked familiar.

The second night

Abu Hassan told him to go away.

The Caliph asked why.

"Because the last man I brought home cost me two weeks in the asylum," said Abu Hassan, "and I do not know how, and I have decided not to find out."

The Caliph laughed until he had to sit down on the parapet.

Then he told him.

And Abu Hassan, who had every reason to be furious, sat and listened to the whole of it, and at the end of it asked one question.

"The four men," he said. "Did that hold? Or did they come back?"

"It held," said the Caliph.

"Then it was worth the fortnight," said Abu Hassan.

The Caliph took him into his household after that, and Abu Hassan spent the rest of his life saying exactly what he thought to the most powerful man in the world, which turned out to be the job he had been qualified for all along.