Chapter 1 interrogates a referential frame that happened to inform a cultural milieu and legitimize the use of the term “Arabian Nightism” in discussions that relate to presumed sumptuousness and lavish spending. The phrasing shows, however, how the Nights permeates a consciousness and how it inhabits the European and American culture in multifarious ways and contexts that justify addressing it as a knowledge consortium, an epistemic inception that continued to direct or challenge regimes of thought. Its trajectory in these cultures demonstrate constants and variables in reception and appropriation, and invite us to draw a comparison with its native culture in relation to issues of literacy and orality.