Saiful Maluk

For the lake in northern Pakistan, see Lake Saiful Muluk.

The Story of Prince Saiful Maluk (Arabic: قِصَّة سَيْف الْمُلُوْك وَبَدِيْع الْجَمَال, romanized: Qiṣat Saif al-Mulūk wa Badīʿ al-Jamāl) is an Arabic fable, a story of love between a prince and a fairy. It is considered a later addition to the One Thousand and One Nights collection of Arabic fables.

In South Asia, the story was put into beautiful Punjabi verse by 19th-century poet and mystic Mian Muhammad Bakhsh. It has also been retold in numerous languages such as Balochi, Bengali, English, Urdu and Punjabi.[1]

The story might have given the name to the Saiful Malook lake in northern Pakistan, regarded as one of the most beautiful lakes in the country.[2][3][4][5]

  1. ^ Shackle, Christopher. “The Story of Sayf Al-Mulūk in South Asia.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17, no. 2 (2007): 115–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188702.
  2. ^ Ram Babu Saksena. A history of Urdu literature: with a foreword. R. N. Lal, 1940.
  3. ^ Amaresh Datta. Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1987.
  4. ^ Janet Parker; Alice Mills; Julie Stanton. Mythology: Myths, Legends and Fantasies. Struik, 2007.
  5. ^ Thomas Grahame Bailey. A history of Urdu literature. Oxford University Press, 2008.