The English translation of 1001 Nights by Richard Burton from 1888 is explicit for its time, and it seems that Burton made the translation even spicier than the original.
The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite. The Medinah girl put her hand to his yard and handled it, whereupon it rose and the Meccan sprang up and drew it to herself. Quoth the other, “What is this unjust aggression? A tradition was related to me by Malik after Al-Zuhri, after Abdallah ibn Salim, after Sa’νd bin Zayd, that the Apostle of Allah (whom Allah bless and keep!) said: Whoso enquickeneth a dead land, it is his.” And the Meccan answered, “It is related to us by Sufyan, from Abu Zanad, from Al-A’araj, from Abu Horayrah, that the Apostle of Allah said: The quarry is his who catcheth it, not his who starteth it.” But the Irak girl pushed them both away and taking it to herself, said, “This is mine, till your contention be decided.”
This is one of the sexier stories and while it’s not particularly titillating by modern standards, it has a good punchline and with updated references would be indistinguishable from the jokes my friends and I would tell each other when we were twelve years old. Burton puts it well in the Terminal Essay, or afterword, of his translation:
Readers who have perused the ten volumes will probably agree with me that the naive indecencies of the text are rather gaudisserie than prurience; and, when delivered with mirth and humour, they are rather the “excrements of wit” than designed for debauching the mind. Crude and indelicate with infantile plainness; even gross and, at times, “nasty” in their terrible frankness, they cannot be accused of corrupting suggestiveness or subtle insinuation of vicious sentiment. Theirs is a coarseness of language, not of idea; they are indecent, not depraved.
Here are some beautiful (but not sexy, sorry) illustrations from a late 19th century German edition of 1001 Nights.
Nehaveigur 