This trope has proven to have a greater deal of Unfortunate Implications in recent times, especially after the publication of Edward W. Said's Orientalism, himself a Palestinian Christian.
In that book, Said noted that researchers, writers, poets and painters were so coloured by this trope, this exotic fantasy of "the East" and "the Orient" that it tended to prevail in serious, academic and objective books about the same area, conflating regionally diverse and multi-ethnic people into a single whole with no attention given to variations, ebb and flow of social changes.
He criticized the fact that there were very few attempts to include local sources, no attempt to involve regional writers and all other basic facts of academic research. Had the same treatment been accorded to an European nation, he noted, then nobody would take that research seriously.
Since then, many authors and writers have criticized the persistent tendency in Anglo-American and in some cases French work to keep showing the Middle East in a one-dimensional way, either in this exotic fashion of harem girls and hookah, or a theocratic nation state, with no attempt at looking at how people lived on the ground, variations in habits and all sorts of hidden resistance and subversion.
When Arabs love their own stories about them
In the second half of the 20th century, animated productions on the Arabian Nights tales became popular with Middle Eastern audiences, ranging from Western productions such as Disney's famous take on Aladdin or the Japanese produced Arabian Nights: Adventures of Sinbad, which has an Arabic dub well loved to this day, and whose Arabic opening
is treated as a popular children's song and semi-official anthem for the character.
What differentiated these these productions was often that due to being animated, it obviously skirted around the issue of non Middle Eastern actors donning "Brownface", or at least "Browner-face" given that many Middle Eastern peoples do pass for Caucasian, but were still being portrayed by people who shared no ancestry with them. Therefore, it was easier for Middle Easterners to consume animated media about them and their fairy tales without seeing their ethnicity treated as a costume. Furthermore, animated adaptations as mentioned above could also be dubbed into Arabic or Farsi to ease the immersion of the portrayed audience.
Importantly, Arabian Nights works began to gradually step away from white savior tropes that permeated depictions of the Orient in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, and instead featured a more even handed portrayl of Middle Easterners as heroes and villains alike in their own terms. While still incorporating many stereotypical tropes such as harem girls, wicked viziers and Genies, they were treated more as celebrations of Middle Eastern mythologies no less offensive than dragons and wizards in Western inspired fantasies, and not as signs of a backwards people.
A Lesser of Two Evils compared to Qurac?
After the 9/11 attacks and the advent of the War on Terror, the Arabian Nights trope began to fall out of fashion in the West in favor of depicting the Middle East as not just backwards, but outright malicious and anti-Western.
Western media set in the Middle East in the advent of the 21st century repeated the issue of the Arabian Nights trope by showing the whole region as a bunch of camel riding, uniform and exotic people. However, this was done to outright dehumanize the populace instead of misguidedly celebrate them, and any positive depictions of the land being full of adventure, rich history, art and magical wonder was replaced with the land being full of either terrorists, dictators or the corrupt Arab Oil Sheikh which curiously was almost never depicted to be an American ally despite the alliance between the USA and Gulf Monarchies being a fact of the region.
Just as how the worst of the Orientalist Arabian Nights stories depicted the Middle Eastern people as needing of a white savior or ignorant fools, "Qurac" media tended to depict them as faceless masses ready to blow up an American convoy at anytime soon or lacked agency in needing to be liberated from their horrors by the brave Western Militaries. This has caused Middle Eastern communities to adopt a "Grass is Greener" view of Arabian Nights stories produced in the west in that while they were ignorant, didn't seem to be as spiteful as the flood of unfortunate works produced after 9/11.
However, much like how Orientalist Arabian Nights stories went out of fashion, The New '10s saw a rising backlash to this Xenophobic depiction of Middle Eastern people in favor of something more nuanced. With the advent of Middle Eastern people themselves shoving their own productions onto the internet and world stage, the current hope amongst its people is to finally normalize a depiction of their land that whilst not ignoring its numerous problems, makes a true reflection of who they really are and what their mythologies constitute, and not what outsiders impose on them. Another factor that led to this backlash was that the Gulf states themselves - especially Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates - began expanding their soft power outside of the energy sector and encouraging non-oil-related Western companies to invest in other aspects of the economies of the Gulf states.
Overall, while Arabian Nights Days tropes do have their problems, Middle Eastern people are still far more excited to have the world know about their fairy tales so as long as it's done from a place of understanding. The exotic tropes are still prevalent in Japanese Anime and Games which often default to this setting when depicting the Middle East, but whether it's due to the "shared bond" of both regions being on the receiving end of orientalism, the lack of Japan's propagation of War On Terror media, the perception that Japan simply "does it better" or some combination of the three, there has not been major, if it all, backlash from the Middle East against Japan's take on the Arabian Nights setting so far.
