I am an avid consumer of myth & fairy tale reading, whether modern fantasy or European folklore. In such reading there are tons of examples of morality that doesn't quite square with our modern sensibilities, but never before have I encountered such bluntly, descriptively racist and sexist stuff. The one thousand and one nights is decidedly different in that regard, taking its time to describe adulterous women and men getting gruesomely slain, women getting "justly" beaten to a pulp for arguing with their husbands, and especially vicious descriptions of "hideous blackamoors with lips so large as to gather up all the sands in the room."
I am not shy about looking nastiness from humanity's past in the face - But I do find myself wondering if any of this is embellished in translation.
I noticed the popular translations happened in the late 1800s, which one might argue is kind of the hayday of academic racism.
I need an expert to tell me either "oh yea, unfortunately that's all accurate, the middle east was racist and sexist AF" or... "your hunch is correct, it was vastly embellished by its anti Muslim and imperialist translators, here's a more even handed translation."
Anyone care to have a discussion? Every culture has its poisons, the middle east included, but it seems a bit much.
You might be interested in my answer on When Richard Burton the explorer published his version of Arabian Nights, it attracted obscenity charges. These days the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba et al are regarded as children's stories. What was in Burton's version (or the original text) that accrued such an outraged response?
The issue of translation is often complicated because we are talking a heterogenous tradition rather than a single homogenous set of texts. So it is not just the issue of multiple translations from a single manuscript, but multiple translations from different manuscripts, many of them not in the original Arabic, but in French or some other European language - and even the Arabic versions of the tales might have been borrowed, or adapted, in part from various older sources.