The Tale of the Three Princes and the Princess Nouronnihar
At a Glance
- Central figures: Prince Hussain, Prince Ali, and Prince Ahmed - three brothers and rival suitors - and their cousin Princess Nouronnihar, whose hand each of them seeks.
- Setting: A kingdom ruled by a wise Sultan, in the tradition of The 1001 Nights; the princes travel east, west, and north in search of extraordinary treasures.
- The turn: Nouronnihar falls gravely ill while the princes are away, and all three treasures - the telescope, the magic carpet, and the healing apple - are required together to save her life.
- The outcome: Because each prince’s contribution proved equally essential, the Sultan cannot choose among them; the brothers relinquish their competing claims, and Nouronnihar retains the right to decide her own future.
- The legacy: No single prince wins the princess; what endures is the Sultan’s declaration that Nouronnihar’s hand remains hers to grant, the rivalry dissolved by the act of saving her.
It is told that a Sultan had three sons - Hussain, Ali, and Ahmed - and that all three loved the same woman. She was their cousin, the Princess Nouronnihar, known for the grace of her bearing and the kindness she showed to everyone who approached her. The Sultan loved his sons and could not bear to wound any of them, so he did what powerful men do when they wish the problem to solve itself: he turned it into a contest.
“Set out from here,” he told his sons, “each in a different direction. Find the rarest treasure in the world. When you return, we shall judge whose gift is the greatest - and that man will wed Nouronnihar.”
Three Roads from the Palace
Prince Hussain rode east, toward a city famous for its markets - a place of dyers and spice merchants and dealers in things that could not easily be explained. There, in a stall half-hidden behind bolts of Kashmiri cloth, he found a carpet. Small enough to roll under one arm. Unremarkable in color. The merchant demonstrated its power once, and Hussain paid what was asked without bargaining. The carpet would carry its rider anywhere in the world in the span of a breath.
Prince Ali went west to a kingdom of artisans, where craftsmen bent over benches producing instruments of glass and silver that could measure the movements of stars. In a small shop he found a telescope - not a sailor’s instrument, but an enchanted one, capable of revealing any scene in the known world, near or distant, at the holder’s will. Ali bought it and turned for home.
Prince Ahmed traveled north, where he encountered an old merchant on a bare road who carried almost nothing. What he carried was a single apple, smooth and heavy in the hand. The apple, the merchant said, could cure any sickness, close any wound, return the dying to the living. Ahmed had not come looking for an apple. He bought it anyway.
The Telescope Finds Bad News
The three brothers converged near the kingdom’s borders by chance - or by the particular timing that stories require. Before any of them could boast of what he had found, Prince Ali lifted his telescope and turned it toward the palace. He adjusted the lens. His face changed.
Nouronnihar was ill. Not mildly, not with a passing fever. She lay in her chambers barely breathing, her attendants clustered helpless around her.
There was no discussion. Hussain spread his carpet on the ground. All three brothers stepped onto it and arrived at her bedside before the palace guard had time to announce them.
The Apple in Her Hands
Ahmed pressed the apple into Nouronnihar’s fingers. The room was quiet enough that they could hear the sound of the palace fountain below the window.
Color came back to her face. Then her breathing steadied. Then her eyes opened. By the time the Sultan reached the chamber, his niece was sitting upright, asking for water.
The Sultan looked at his three sons. The telescope had found the danger. The carpet had crossed the distance. The apple had undone the illness. Not one of these things worked without the other two.
“Each of you has saved her,” he said. “I cannot give her to one and call it just.”
Nouronnihar’s to Decide
The brothers stood in silence after the Sultan spoke. The rivalry that had sent them east, west, and north - that had kept each of them confident, all those weeks on the road, that his particular treasure would be the one to settle the matter - dissolved in that silence.
They had each come home holding something extraordinary. Together, those three things had been enough. Separately, none of them would have been.
They withdrew their claims. The Sultan, for his part, did not reassign Nouronnihar to any man by decree. Her hand, he announced, remained her own to grant when she was ready to grant it. She thanked her cousins for what they had brought back from the edges of the world.
The carpet was folded away. The telescope sat on its shelf. The apple was gone, having done its work. What remained was Nouronnihar, alive, and three princes who had learned that some contests do not end the way the person who arranges them intends.