The Story of Scheherazade

Also known as Shahrzad ki Kahani

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Alif Laila Stories

King Shahryar had been betrayed by his wife, and it broke something in him.

He decided that no woman would ever be given the chance to do it again. So he made a rule: he would marry a new bride each evening, and each morning she would be put to death, before she could ever be false to him.

He kept the rule for three years. The city emptied. Families sent their daughters away in the night. Grief settled over the whole kingdom, and nobody could think of any way to stop it.

The vizier's daughter

The King's vizier was the man who had to find the brides. He had two daughters of his own, and the elder was named Scheherazade.

She had read everything in her father's house — histories, poetry, medicine, the sayings of kings, and more stories than anyone could count.

One evening she told her father she wished to marry the King.

He refused. He argued. He begged. He told her plainly what would happen to her in the morning.

"I know exactly what happens in the morning," she said. "That is why I am going. Either I will stop this, or I will be one more. But I think I can stop it."

In the end he could not move her, and he took her to the palace.

The first night

Before she went, she gave her younger sister Dunyazad one instruction.

So that night, in the King's chamber, Dunyazad said, as she had been told: "Sister, before it is light, will you tell us one of your stories?"

Scheherazade looked at the King, and the King, who could not sleep anyway, said she might.

She began a story about a merchant and a jinn.

She told it well. The King listened, and forgot for a while what he was, and what the morning was for.

And as the sky began to turn grey at the window, Scheherazade stopped.

She stopped in the middle. The merchant was standing in front of the jinn with a sword raised over him, and the ending had not come.

"It is dawn," she said. "I must not go on."

The King lay in the dark and thought about it. Then he decided that she could not be killed that morning, because he wanted the end of the story.

A thousand nights

The next night she finished it. And then, because there was still an hour left, she began another one.

And at dawn she stopped in the middle of that one too.

So it went. Merchants, fishermen, jinn sealed in bottles, thieves, princes on wooden horses, a sailor who landed on a whale. Some nights the story inside the story had a story inside it, and she left all three unfinished at once.

The King stopped counting the days. Then he stopped thinking about the rule at all. Somewhere in those nights he began to talk to her about the stories, and then about other things, and the man who had made the rule slowly stopped existing.

It took a thousand and one nights.

On the last of them Scheherazade finished her story, and did not begin another. She sent for their three sons, who had been born during those years, and stood in front of the King and asked him to let her live.

He had stopped wanting anything else a long time before.