Ahmed el-Bagdadi, from the Bedouin tribe of the Benni Hussaynieh, “bold horsemen, fierce for gain, ticklish dignity”, abandoned the nomadic life for the joys of the bazaar. So many years later, in the honorable guild of thieves of Baghdad, the “city of gold”, of which he was a skilled and respected member, he is still spoken of with a mixture of awe and fascination. This novel is the prodigious tale of his adventures, his exploits and his clandestine love affair with a princess.
If no one has forgotten the Raoul Walsh film that made Douglas Fairbanks famous in 1924, who remembers the screenwriter, one of the most popular authors of the interwar period: “Captain” Achmed Abdullah? He immediately turned it into a “novel-cinema” worthy of the Arabian Nights, with its unbridled orientalism. The Thief of Baghdad, wrote Douglas Fairbanks in his preface, ”is the story of the things we dream of, a tale of what happens when we step outside ourselves to conquer the Lands of Fantasy.
A century after its publication, it’s time to rediscover the masterpiece of this forgotten writer-adventurer!
