Medieval Arabic anecdote collections regularly contain pious stories of deliverance (faraj) after distress (shiddah) in which recognition inflects the relief with which such narratives tend to end. These stories cater to and display popular sentiment on the whole, though they are preserved in highbrow belles-lettristic (adab) collections of prose. Deliverance from evil, as a Christian might be more linguistically primed to say, is occasionally highlighted at the end of a story as a didactic message that accrues from events; however, the cognitive mechanism that unfolds and unveils faraj is rarely perceived in any kind of informal gloss or in a statement of poetics, which may take the form of a verse epilogue appended to the end of a tale. We may consider briefly, from the Arabian Nights, ‘The Island King and the Pious Israelite’ which ends with just such a feature. It is a tale of a family's vanished prosperity, flight and separation wrought devastatingly by shipwreck (that old chestnut). The father is separated from his wife and two young sons during their voyage to a land where no one knows them in order to escape the ruthless exploitation at home by evil creditors. By and by, and rather more quickly than seems credible, the father becomes the king of a prosperous island to which visitors are attracted from far and wide. Among them, after discrete and staggered arrivals, are his two sons, whom he fails to recognise, and his wife, who does recognise their two sons from the retrouvailles that takes place between them, for they have been recounting their past lives audibly while keeping a wary eye over the imposing figure of their as yet unknown mother. Their stories are those that mark and signal their identities – the story of their shared diaspora – and in this sense they are classic ‘hommes récits’, though accounts of their tribulations are relatively bare given the brevity of the tale. Their childhood severance becomes the very foretoken of their reunion, which is in the end a happy paradox.