A Comparative Analysis of Tawfiq al-Hakim's Shahrzad and Tahmineh Millani's Shahrzad (the Woman of One Thousand and One Nights) based on Eric Fromm's Theory of Personality

One Thousand and One Nights is of great significance among many different nations in a way that many works in various genres have been inspired by it.  Each of these works has artistically recreated the structure and content of the original story based on the author's views towards life and psychosocial needs. The present paper is a descriptive analytical research and offers a comparative study of the play Shahrzad by Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987) and the screenplay Shahrzad (the Woman of One Thousand and One Nights) by Tahmineh Milani (1960-) based on Erich Fromm's (1900-1980) theory of personality. The findings indicate that according to Fromm's theory of character, character orientations in both works are mostly of Receptive type, even though Shahrzad has both Receptive and Marketing orientations, the Receptive orientation dominates the Marketing one. Tawfiq al-Hakim's play has a philosophical and ontological viewpoint and searches for the discovery of truth by combining pure wisdom and insight (heart) and, in this respect, is different from Milani's narrative. However, both these works have similarities in their subject matters, themes and their central characters. The king's journey is fundamentally different in these works, in a way that Shahriar's journey in Tawfiq al-Hakim's play is philosophical -mystical in nature, while in Milani's screenplay it is a literal, ordinary trip.