Hikayat

(also hikâyet), a literary term of the peoples of the Near and Middle East and Southeast Asia. In the broad sense, a hikayat is any long narrative work in prose or sometimes in verse. In the narrow sense, it is an anonymous prose work in book form, such as the 17th-century Malay work The Tale of Hang Tuah. In Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures, the term is synonymous with “short story.” In Turkish literature it also refers to an anonymous folk story.