Alf Layla wa-Layla — The Thousand and One Nights — has no single author, date, or settled text. It grew over centuries from a lost Persian original, an Arabic Baghdad layer set at the court of Harun al-Rashid, and a later Egyptian compilation. Its frame story is famous: the king Shahryar executes a new wife each dawn until Shahrazad survives by telling stories that break off unfinished at sunrise. The work became a global sensation only through Antoine Galland's French translation of 1704–1717. "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" — now the most famous tales — were added by Galland, likely from stories told to him by the Aleppan Hanna Diyab.
Most people who love "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" are loving stories that may never have been part of the Arabic book at all. The Thousand and One Nights has no author and no fixed text. It grew over centuries from an older Persian collection, an Arabic Baghdad layer, and a later Egyptian one, and its title signals abundance more than an exact tally. In its homeland it was popular entertainment, outside the prestige canon of classical Arabic letters. Then a Frenchman named Antoine Galland translated it in the early 1700s. He added several of its most famous tales — "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" among them — from stories a young Aleppan, Hanna Diyab, had told him in Paris. The West fell in love and built a glittering fantasy of "the Orient" on top of it. The book the modern world adores is not just the medieval Arabic collection. It is that older, layered work remade by Galland, Hanna Diyab, and centuries of Western translation and fantasy.