Discuss the portrayal of women in Islamic literature, referencing both Nezami’s Haft Payker and The Thousand and One Nights

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

1. The Haft Paykar, Nezami’s masterpiece, narrates how, one day, the legendary Persian prince Bahram Gur discovers a mysterious pavilion with portraits of seven beautiful princesses decorating its walls. He falls in love with all of them, marries them, sets up each princess in a separate pavilion of her own, and visits them one by one. Each princess tells him a story meant to instruct him in the art of love and the love of beauty.
2. The framing tale of The Thousand and One Nights derives from the Indian story of Scheherazade (Shahrasad, in Persian), who chooses to marry King Shahryar, who so fears the prospect of female infidelity that he kills each new wife on the morning after their wedding night. In a conscious defense of womankind, Scheherazade knows that if she can tell a story each night and carefully construct it so as to reach its climax just after dawn, the king must let her live until the next evening in order to hear the tale’s ending. After a thousand nights—and some 250 tales—the king comes to appreciate Scheherazade’s beauty, wit, and civilizing power, and so spares her the fate of all his previous wives.
3. Both the Haft Paykar and The Thousand and One Nights portray women in almost total subservience to the ruler/husband, but the women in each tale assert a certain real authority. In the Haft Paykar, women bring the prince Bahram Gur to a state of wisdom and spiritual wholeness. In The Thousand and One Nights, women’s intelligence, wit, and reason at least equal and sometimes surpass that of their male counterparts. The latter work, however, embodies a tension that pervades Islamic culture to this day and perhaps Western culture as a whole: the tension between the exercise of authoritarian power over women in patriarchal society and the need for women to free themselves of that power.