AS WITH ANY INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVOR, the idea behind this book was born in a question. It was actually a series of questions that came to me one night many years ago as I walked out of a small movie theater in San Rafael, California. I had seen a special screening of the Disney cartoon feature film Aladdin. It was a tale set in the Orient, and was thus filled with images of colorful, bustling bazaars, palatial interiors, gleaming jewels and the chink of gold, duplicitous thieves, beautiful, sequestered women, cruel villains, a genie, and, naturally, a flying carpet. As I emerged from this filmic Oriental fantasy into the cool night air, however, I began to wonder what it was that was so appealing about these fictionalized clichés about Asia and the Arab world. Why did this kaleidoscope of images have such a hold on my imagination, and seem just as, if not more, familiar to me than what I had actually experienced during a childhood and adolescence spent in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Beirut? What enabled this fantastical cartoon production to elicit such pleasure and enjoyment, and how had the image of the Orient that lay at the movie’s core maintained its coherence in my own mind despite the memories of what I had seen?

In retrospect, it seems less coincidence than destiny that the expedition to the movie theater to see Aladdin had served as a break from reading Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic poem Parzival. While the knight’s quest for the Holy Grail bore little resemblance to the tale of Aladdin’s rise from beggar boy to prince, embedded in the medieval romance were also Oriental moments that resonated with the depiction of sensuality, wonder, and mystery in the twentieth-century rendering of the folktale from The Thousand and One Nights. Eight hundred years lay between Wolfram’s monumental work and the animated film, and yet the Orient still remained an elected site for experiencing Otherness, the locus in which foreignness, excess, and desire are played out in the Western imagination. When, in the medieval narrative’s penultimate chapter, Parzival’s half-brother Feirefiz arrives on the scene, he is a vision of strangeness and splendor.