YMMV / The Story of Sidi Nouman

• Angst? What Angst?: Amine gets punished only for her malignant use of magic: she's turned into a horse because she turned her husband into a dog first. Although the story's focus of her monstrosity is on her graveyard-scavenging, Nouman and the caliph as characters don't actually make much of a deal about it.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Amine is often misinterpreted or misrepresented as being a ghoul, but the tale is clear that she is a human herself. For one, Nouman recognizes the ghoul at the cemetery as a ghoul on sight, but he never identifies Amine as one even though he's ostensibly seen her nude and up close. Even his discovery of her cemetery meals doesn't trigger any reconsideration of her species. For two, the sorceress who studied magic with Amine and knew her well also is quiet on anything remarkable about Amine other than that she's always known her to be dangerous.
  • Other than "The Story of Sidi Nouman", there are no older or contemporary stories known of folkloric ghouls as cemetery-dwellers and corpse-eaters. The tale does state this isn't usual behavior and that ghouls are to be expected to hunt prey, but also claims it's not extraordinary behavior depending on circumstances. All the same, the general takeaway in the West has been that ghouls are cemetery-dwelling corpse-eaters.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: There is an overall folkloric inclination that ghouls are female, but there are traditions that don't assign a singular gender to ghouls and some even state that ghouls are always male. In Galland's version of "The Story of Sidi Nouman", the ghoul is almost certain to be female because the French text contains "une goule" and "la goule", not to mention that the "e" at the end of "goule" may very well represent the "ة" of the female "لغولة", "ghouleh". English, among others, does not have gendered articles and a direct translation loses the female identification. On top of that, it's an easy interpretation that Amine is unfaithful to Nouman because she doesn't enjoy dining with him, but she does enjoy dining with the ghoul. Heteronormativity therefore raises the expectation that the ghoul is male. In his version, Burton goes so far as to annotate that "Galland has une Goule, i.e. a Ghúlah, a she-Ghúl, an ogress. But the lady was supping with a male of that species." Considering that the oldest source of the tale is Diyab and Burton lived a century after his passing, Burton's claim about the ghoul's gender is unsubstantiated. Possibly, Burton unknowingly worked with an Arabic translation of Galland's version thinking it was the original folklore and the ghoul is either male or gender-unspecified in that version. Arabic also uses gender-neutral articles. That it is a translation of Galland's work is without question: the two as-you-know paragraphs that can only be Galland's addition appear in Burton's version too.
• Viewer Name Confusion: In various prints, "Nouman" has also been rendered as "Nuuman" and "Nonman". And while the evil sorceress is named "Amine" in Galland's version, most thereafter spell it as "Amina".