IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK I recount how the convergence of experiences—watching the late twentieth-century movie Aladdin and reading the early thirteenth-century masterpiece Parzival—initiated this study. The potency of the Oriental stereotypes they mobilized and the similarity of the clichés presented in the two works, despite the hundreds of years that lay between them, led to the question of whether these stereotypes are indeed immutable, as Edward Said’s work suggests, and why they continue to inhabit the symbolic landscape of the Western imagination with such vibrancy and evocative power. Despite some controversy over the negative representation of some of its Arab characters, the American film Aladdin was the highest grossing film in the United States in 1992, the year of its release, earning over $217 million in the domestic market. It was also an international success, adding an additional $300 million in sales overseas, of which nearly 10 percent was generated by German viewers. The film met with critical as well as popular acclaim in Germany, although some reviewers decried the Americanization of the tale of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.” In a review of Aladdin for the Süddeutsche Zeitung after its 1993 release in Germany, the film critic Michael Althen wrote of the Disney film:

One can hardly refute Althen’s assessment (and the many accusations like it) of the culturally imperialist potential of Disney’s production machine, given its global incursions and its freewheeling reconfigurations of cultural artifacts (one thinks of Hans Christian Andersen’s repentant—and doomed—“Little Mermaid” transformed into “Ariel,” the rebellious redhead who finally marries the prince, as just one of many examples). Althen’s article demonstrates a short cultural memory, however.