original_language_of_work arabian nights and days
Naguib Mahfouz ("", ; December 11 , 1911  August 30 , 2006 ) was an ___MASK55___ writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature . He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of ___MASK32___ literature , along with Tawfiq el - Hakim , to explore themes of existentialism . He published 34 novels , over 350 short stories , dozens of movie scripts , and five plays over a 70 - year career . Many of his works have been made into ___MASK55___ and foreign films . Arabian Nights and Days ( 1979 ) is a novel by ___MASK55___ writer Naguib Mahfouz , winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature . The novel serves as a sequel and companion piece for One Thousand and One Nights and includes many of the same characters that appeared in the original work such as Shahryar , Scheherazade , and Aladdin . One Thousand and One Nights (" kitb alf layla wa - layla ") is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in ___MASK32___ during the Islamic Golden Age . It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights , from the first English language edition ( 1706 ), which rendered the title as " The Arabian Nights ' Entertainment ". Antoine Galland ( April 4 , 1646  February 17 , 1715 ) was a ___MASK15___ orientalist and archaeologist , most famous as the first European translator of " One Thousand and One Nights " which he called " Les mille et une nuits ". His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world . Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read . ___MASK32___ literature (/ ALA - LC : " al - Adab al - Arab ") is the writing , both prose and poetry , produced by writers in the ___MASK32___ language . The ___MASK32___ word used for literature is "" Adab "", which is derived from a meaning of etiquette , and which implies politeness , culture and enrichment . Aladdin ("") is a Middle Eastern folk tale . It is one of the tales in " The Book of One Thousand and One Nights " (" The Arabian Nights "), and one of the best known  though it was actually added to the collection in the 18th century by Frenchman Antoine Galland . Egypt (; ', , " Kimi "), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt , is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia by a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula . Egypt is a Mediterranean country bordered by the Gaza Strip and ___MASK20___ to the northeast , the Gulf of Aqaba to the east , the Red Sea to the east and south , Sudan to the south , and Libya to the west . Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan , and across from the Sinai Peninsula lies Saudi Arabia , although Jordan and Saudi Arabia do not share a land border with Egypt . It is the world ' s only contiguous Afrasian nation . Scheherazade , or Shahrazad (""), is a character and the storyteller in " One Thousand and One Nights ". This book includes the tales of Aladdin , Ali Baba and many more . ___MASK32___ (' or ' ) is a Central Semitic language that was first spoken in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the " lingua franca " of the Arab world . ___MASK32___ also is a liturgical language of 1 . 7 billion Muslims . It is one of six official languages of the United Nations . It is named after the Arabs , a term initially used to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti - Lebanon mountains in the west , and from northwestern Arabia to the Sinai in the south .