Professor René R. Khawam (Aleppo, 1917-Paris, 2004) is one of the most important European Arabists of all time. Translator, among other works, of the Koran, The Book of Tricks and the complete editions of Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad the Terrestrial, Khawam is known above all for the excellent edition he prepared of The Thousand and One Nights, a work to which he dedicated twenty years of meticulous and rigorous work. In 1996 he received the Grand National Prize for Letters for his work as a whole.