Arab influences in European literature began to appear in the poetry of the early Spanish and Provençal troubadours, and, in the thirteenth century, in the French fabliaux and contes.
    No Western author expressed Europe's fascination with any aspect of Arabism in a more dramatic and poetic form than did Shakespeare. Among his most attractive characters, two are Arabs, or as he calls them, "Moors": Othello, from the play of the same name and the Prince of Morocco, one of the noblest figures in The Merchant of Venice. The prince, modeled on the great Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur, shows a royal dignity expressed in words of great nobility.
    Whereas the Prince of Morocco is but a minor character in The Merchant of Venice, Othello completely dominates the drama to which his name is given. A man of unbounded passion, this Moor—"who comes from a land of deserts, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven" (an obvious reference to the Atlas Mountains)—is also a paragon of loyalty, courage, honesty, and possessed of a nobility rendered more striking by contrast with the infamy of the "white" Iago. To the present day, experts acquainted with the Moorish character are amazed at the insight with which Shakespeare created Othello.
    In the London of Queen Elizabeth I, Morocco was very much "in the news." Among the founders of the "Barbary Company," an association of London merchants trading with Morocco, we find the Earl of Leicester, one of the Bard's patrons; it was from his many Barbary-merchant friends that Shakespeare obtained much information of Morocco and its people. Altogether we find more than sixty references to Barbary (Morocco) in Shakespeare's plays.
    Shakespeare was by no means alone in falling under the spell of Moorish subjects. In his Tamburlaine the Great of 1587, Christopher Marlowe introduces the "Kings of Moroccus and Fez." A year later a certain Ed. White published A Brief Rehearsal of the Bloody Battle of Barbary; in 1594, George Peel's play, The Battle of Alcazar, was produced in London; and, shortly afterwards, an anonymous author, Ro. C. published a history of Morocco entitled, A True Discourse of Muley Hamet's Death.
    The Oriental fashion, in which Arab elements were often confused with Persian and Indian, persisted through most of the nineteenth century when Victor Hugo could write: "In the age of Louis XIV all the world was Hellenistic; now it is Orientalist" (Preface to Les Orientales). While The Thousand and One Nights did not alone create this romantic flood, it greatly widened the scope of European literature and enriched its imagery and language, producing a focus for Europe's yearning for the exotic and stimulating latent interests among its intellectuals.
    Arabic literature, in addition, to being the crowning artistic and intellectual achievement of the Arabs, also represents one of their most enduring legacies to the West. It is an aspect of the Arab heritage which, though often neglected or given only cursory attention, offers important insights that provide a fuller understanding of Arab culture and its contributions.
    We find Arab names and settings in the famous Aucassin et Nicolette and Arab echoes even in Boccacio's Decameron. Chaucer's Squires Tales uses a theme brought to Europe by Italian merchants who had traded in the Middle East. And, of course, there is the most famous medieval work of literature, Dante's Divine Comedy, replete with details from the story of the Prophet Muhammad's ascension to heaven and details culled from the Meccan Revolution by the great Arab mystic Ibn Arabi.
    Perhaps no work of Arabic literature has stirred Western imagination as much as The Thousand and One Nights, popularly known as The Arabian Nights. A collection of separate stories—exciting, romantic, amusing and always highly entertaining— the book has Arab, Greek, Persian and Indian origins. It was finally compiled and unified by Arab authors in the tenth century, giving it an entirely Arab character, placing its two main centers in Baghdad and Cairo. At times, with the salty humor of true folk tales and always with an astounding inventiveness, the book enjoyed a great popularity throughout the Middle East where it was known chiefly through oral transmission by professional storytellers. Its popularity with the European public, however, was infinitely greater. The first translation by the Frenchman Galland, in 1704, was soon followed by English versions. Their was spectacular, and new editions followed one another in the most enviable manner of modern best-sellers.
    The astounding popularity that The Thousand and One Nights enjoyed in Europe from the start can be traced to the "oriental" yearnings that had been growing among Western writers, artists and readers ever since the days of the Crusades. The public found in these tales an element of romance and adventure that was missing from European literature. To be sure, The Thousand and One Nights was partly responsible for the composition of European novels as famous as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels. Arabism, or "Orientalism," as it was usually called, provided Western writers with a wealth of new themes. We find such themes in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, in Byron, in the satires of Voltaire, and, of the French reformers, in Beckford's Vathek, in Germany, in Goethe's famous Westoestlicher Diwan, and in Rukert and Platen-Hallermund.