The Legend of Sidi Numan

Record summary

The Arabian Nights story of Sidi Numan, available in nineteenth-century English translations, concerns a husband who discovers his wife’s nocturnal transformation and follows her to a liminal burial-ground setting. His own transformation into a dog and eventual restoration create a compact narrative about social identity, animal disguise, forbidden observation, and passage between domestic and monstrous worlds. It is a literary tale rather than an incident report. Editions differ in title, sequence, and detail, so Burton’s version should be checked against Arabic manuscripts or critical editions.