The Thief of Bagdad by Achmed Abdullah

Book Details

A resourceful young thief falls in love with the Princess Zobeid and must go on a quest to win her love while navigating a world filled with treachery, betrayal, and magical forces.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924) was based on Douglas Fairbanks‘ fantasy of the Arabian Nights and was the expansion of a story by “Elton Thomas” (Achmed Abdullah and Douglas Fairbanks). The story was made into a film that was a classic of the silent film era.

The film The Thief of Bagdad was produced by Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Raoul Walsh, with art director William Cameron Menzies tasked with building the elaborate and highly detailed sets that conveyed the grandeur and opulence of the fictional Baghdad.

The film starred Douglas Fairbanks as the Thief, Julanne Johnston as the Princess, and a young Anna May Wong as the conniving Mongol slavegirl.

In the 1910s, Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) emigrated to the United States and eventually became a writer and playwright, and later on, a Hollywood screenwriter. Abdullah’s work appeared in various US magazines, including Argosy, All-Story Magazine, Munsey’s Magazine and Blue Book. He earned an Academy Award nomination for collaborating on the screenplay to the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924) is an eleven chapter novel. This edition features 20 illustrations.

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Excerpt: The Thief of Bagdad

Chapter 1

IN THE ORIENT’S motley, twisted annals the tale of Ahmed el-Bagdadi’s—  “the Thief of Bagdad,” as he is called in the ancient records— search for happiness, which is by the same token the tale of his adventures and exploits and love, has assumed in the course of time the character of something Homeric, something epic and fabulous, something close-woven to the golden loom of the desert in both pattern and sweep of romance.

It is mentioned with pride by his own tribe, the Benni Hussaynieh, a raucous-tongued, hard-riding breed of Bedouins, brittle of honor and greedy of gain, of whom— due to a father, tired of the sterile Arabian sands and eager for the pleasures of bazaar and marketplace— he was the city-bred descendant. It is spoken of with a mixture of awe and envy by the Honorable Guild of Bagdad Thieves of whom he was once a keen and highly respected member. It is wide-blown through the flaps of the nomads’ black felt tents from Mecca to Jeddah and beyond; berry-brown, wizen old women cackle its gliding gossip as they brew the coffee for the morning meal or rock the blown-up milk skins upon their knees till the butter rolls yellow and frothing; and, on the sun-cracked lips of the cameleers, on the honeyed, lying lips of overland traders and merchants, the tale has drifted South as far as the Sahara, North to the walls of grey, stony Bokhara, Southeast and Northeast to Pekin’s carved dragon gates and the orchid plains and ochre mountains of Hindustan, and West to the pleasant, odorous gardens of Morocco where garrulous whitebeards comment upon it as they digest the brave deeds of the past in the curling, blue smoke of their water-pipes.

“Wah hyat Ullah—  as God liveth!” their telling begins. “This Ahmed el-Bagdadi—  what a keen lad he was! A deer in running! A cat in climbing! A snake in twisting! A hawk in pouncing! A dog in scenting! Fleet as a hare! Stealthy as a fox! Tenacious as a wolf! Brave as a lion! Strong as an elephant in mating-time!

Or, taking a blade of grass between thumb and second finger, another ancient will exclaim:

“Wah hyat hatha el-awd wah er-rub el-mabood— by the life of this stem and the blessed Lord God! Never, in all Islam, lived there one to equal Ahmed the Thief in quality and pride, the scope and exquisite charm of his thievery!”

Or perhaps:

“Wah hyat duqny— by the honor of these my whiskers! Once, O True Believers, it happened in Bagdad the Golden! Aye— may I eat dirt — may I not be father to my sons if I lie! But once, indeed, it happened in Bagdad the Golden!”

And then the full, rich tale. The wondrous ending.

YET THE TALE’S ORIGINAL cause was simple enough, consisting in the snatching of a well-filled purse, a hungry belly craving food, and the jerk and pull of a magic rope woven from the hair of a purple-faced witch of the left-handed sect; while the scene was the Square of the One-Eyed Jew—  thus called for reasons lost in the mists of antiquity—  in the heart of Bagdad.

Across the South end of the Square straddled the Mosque of Seven Swords, raised on a flight of broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gateway fifty feet into the air, its walls entwining sinuous arabesques of yellow and elfin-green faience beneath the pigeon-blue glare of the sky, its lonely minaret lovely and pointed and snowy-white. East the latticed Bazaar of the Red Sea Traders filtered the sun on rugs and silks, on copper vessels and jewelry and thin gold-inlaid perfume bottles, in an ever-shifting saraband of shadows, rose and purple and sapphire and and purest emerald. North a broad, tree-lined avenue swept on toward the palace of the Caliph of the Faithful that etched the horizon with a tortured abandon of spires and turrets and bartizans. West squatted a packed wilderness of narrow, cobbled alleys; a labyrinth of flat-roofed Arab houses with dead-white walls facing the street, but blossoming toward the inner courtyards with palm and olive and rose-bush. Here, too, was the dim, tortuous Bazaar of the Potters, plum-colored Nubians brought as slaves from Africa and, farther on, a cemetery crisscrossed with Barbary fig and the tiny stone cups filled with grain and water for the birds of passage, in obedience to the blessed Moslem tradition.

In the very centre of the Square of the One-Eyed Jew a great fountain played with sleepy, silvered cadences. And here, on a stone slab a little to one side of the fountain, Ahmed the Thief lay flat on his stomach, his chin cupped in his hands, the sun rays warming his bare, bronzed back, his black eyes darting in all directions like dragon-flies to give warning of rich and careless citizens who might pass within reach of his agile hands and whose purses might be had for a little soft twist and tug.

The Square and the streets and bazaars were teeming with humanity, not to mention humanity’s wives and children and mothers-in-law and visiting country cousins. For today was a holiday: the day before the Lelet el-Kadr, the “Night of Honor,” the anniversary of the occasion when the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in the year 609.

So throngs milled and moiled everywhere: people of half the Orient’s crazy-quilt of races, Arabs and Seljuks and Osmanlis, Tartars and Syrians, Turkomans and Uzbeks, Bokharans, Moors and Egyptians, with here and there men from the Farther East, Chinese, Hindus and Malays, traveling merchants these, come to Bagdad to swap the products of their home lands for what the Arabs’ markets had to offer. They were all making merry after the Orient’s immemorial fashion, resplendently, extravagantly, and noisily: the men swaggering and strutting, fingering their jeweled daggers and cocking their immense turbans at a rakish, devil-may-care angle; the women adjusting their thin-meshed face veils which did not need adjusting at all; the little boys seeing if they could shout richer and louder abuse than the other little boys; the little girls rivaling each other in the gay pansy-shades of their dresses and the consumption of greasy candy.

There were ambulant coffee houses filled with men and women in their silken, colorful holiday best, listening to singers and professional story tellers, smoking and chatting, looking at jugglers, knife twirlers, sword swallowers, and dancing-boys. There were cook shops and lemonade stands, toy booths and merry-go-rounds. There were bear leaders, ape leaders, fakirs, fortune tellers, buffoons and Punch and Judy shows. There were itinerant dervish preachers chanting the glories of Allah the One, of the Prophet Mohammed and the Forty-Seven True Saints. There were bell-shaped tents where golden-skinned, blue-tattooed Bedouin maidens trilled and quavered their desert songs, to the accompaniment of tambourines and shrill scrannel pipes. There was everything which makes life worth the living, including a great deal of love making— the love making of the Orient which is frank, direct, and a trifle indelicate to Western ears and prejudices.

There were of course the many cries of the street.

“Sweet water! Sweet water, and gladden thy soul! Lemonade! Lemonade here!” cried the sellers of that luxury, clanking their brass cups together.

“O chick pease! O pips!” shouted the vendors of parched grains. “Good for the liver— the stomach! To sharpen the teeth!”

“In thy protection, O my Head, O my Eyes!” moaned a peasant, drunk with hashish, whom a turbaned policeman, wielding his rhinoceros-hide whip with all his strength, was flogging toward the station house, the peasant’s wife following with loud plaints of: “Yah Gharati-yah Dahwati! O thou my Calamity— O thou my Shame!”

“Bless the Prophet and give way to our Great Pasha!” exclaimed the panting, black slave who was running by the side of a grandee’s carriage as it crossed the Square.

“O Daughter of the Devil! O Commodity on which Money is lost! O thou especially not wanted!” shrieked a woman as she yanked her tiny, pert-eyed girl-child from beneath the crimson paper partition of a sugar candy booth. The next moment she fondled and kissed her. “O Peace of my Soul!” she cooed. “O Chief Pride of thy Father’s House— though only a girl!”

“The grave is the darkness! Good deeds are the lamps!” wailed the blind beggar woman, rattling two dry sticks.

Friend would meet friend and greet each other with all the extravagance of the Orient, throwing themselves upon each other’s breasts, placing right arm over left shoulder, squeezing like wrestlers, with intermittent hugs and caresses, then laying cheek delicately against cheek and flat palm against palm, at the same time making the loud, smacking noise of many kisses in the air.

Mild-mannered, sleepy-eyed and suave, they would burst into torrents of rage at the next moment because of some fancied insult. Their nostrils would quiver and they would become furious as Bengal tigers. Then would come streams of obscene abuse, carefully chosen phrases of that picaresque vituperation in which the East excels.

“Owl! Donkey! Christian! Jew! Leper! Pig bereft of gratitude, understanding, and the average decencies!” This from an elderly Arab whose long white beard gave him an aspect of patriarchal dignity in ludicrous contrast with the foul invective which he was using. “Unclean and swinish foreigner! May thy countenance be cold! May dogs defile thy mother’s grave!”

Came the reply courteous:

“Basest of illegitimate hyenas! Father of seventeen dogs! Bath servant! Seller of pig’s tripe!”

And then the final retort, drawling, slow-voiced, but bristling with all the venom of the East:

“Ho! Thy maternal aunt had no nose, O thou brother of a naughty sister!”

Then a physical assault, an exchange of blows, fists going like flails, until the grinning, spitting, crimson-turbaned policeman separated the combatants and cuffed them both with cheerful, democratic impartiality.

“Hai! Hai! Hai!” laughed the onlookers.

“Hai! Hai! Hayah! Hai!” laughed the Thief of Bagdad; and the very next moment, as a paunchy, grey-bearded money lender stopped at the fountain and bent to sip a drink of water with cupped hands, Ahmed’s agile fingers descended, twisted, tugged imperceptibly and came up with a well-filled purse.

Excerpt From: Achmed Abdullah. “The Thief of Bagdad.”