Aladdin (/əˈlædɪn/ ə-LAD-in; Arabic: علاء الدين, romanized: ʻAlāʼu d-Dīn/ʻAlāʼ ad-Dīn, IPA: [ʕalaːʔ adˈdiːn], ATU 561, 'Aladdin') is a Middle-Eastern folk tale.

[1] Known along with Ali Baba as one of the "orphan tales", the story was not part of the original Nights collection and has no authentic Arabic textual source, but was incorporated into the book Les mille et une nuits by its French translator, Antoine Galland.

[3] As part of his work on the first critical edition of the Nights, Iraq's Muhsin Mahdi has shown[4] that both these manuscripts are "back-translations" of Galland's text into Arabic.

The sorcerer's real motive is to persuade young Aladdin to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp (chirag) from a booby-trapped magic cave.

With the aid of the genie of the lamp, Aladdin becomes rich and powerful and marries Princess Badroulbadour, the sultan's daughter (after magically foiling her marriage to the vizier's son).

Some have suggested that the intended setting may be Turkestan (encompassing Central Asia and the modern-day Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang in Western China).

For all this, speculation about a "real" Chinese setting depends on a knowledge of China that the teller of a folk tale (as opposed to a geographic expert) might well not possess.

[20][21][22][23] All of these stories deal with a down-on-his-luck and impoverished boy or soldier, who finds a magical item (ring, lamp, tinderbox) that grants his wishes.

In this regard, German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther, in his revision of the international index, published in 2004, remarked that the similarities between the three tale types make it hard to differentiate them.

[26] The ultimate source of the genie in a container tales is Homer's Iliad, where the god Ares is trapped in a bronze urn and offers to grant Hermes whatever he wants if he is set free.

[29] In addition, according to scholar Kurt Ranke, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, the "greatest distribution density" occurs in Europe and in the Mediterranean region, with variants also collected in the Middle East (Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Iran), Central Asia (in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), India (among the Santal people),[30][31] and in Southeast Asia (Indonesia and the Philippines).