The Stance of Sacrifice Rituals in the Stories of One Thousand and One Nights

Sacrifice is among the oldest religious rituals that has received attention by human beings and its life can be tied to the length of human life. One Thousand and One Nights is important and necessary because it shows a deeper understanding of the human's beliefs and convictions during the past centuries. Various researches have been done about the sacrifice and its types in Persian texts. This article aims to study the types of sacrifices (especially human ones), their goals and methods in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights with a descriptive-library method with content analysis tools and also referring to scientific sources and references, journals, and databases. The results show that all kinds of sacrifices (human and animal) have been common among all religions and its purpose was to ward off calamity, fear of the wrath of the gods, legitimizing the need, a religious practice on the feasts of different religions, making aqeeqah and so on. This ritual act changed after the emergence of divine religions and human intellectual growth, and animals replaced man. It is still prevalent in various communities, especially Muslims, and is becoming something not related to killing the alive creatures.