“Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis,” goes the preface. “It’s more what I’d tell you in a coffee house.”
Isn’t that how we’d rather have history presented to us anyway? Wasn’t it just days ago when supposedly smarter people bashed a purported Nadine Lustre account for tweeting a derogatory remark about history as a subject in school? “Stupid. Go back to being an actress,” they said.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that history is “a waste of time,” but don’t you agree to some extent that most teaching methods and a majority of the curricula need some overhauling for the study of history to become more engaging and internalized? To be so effective that hardly anyone becomes apologists for an evident human rights violator? To have a healthy amount of eastern perspective to balance the overwhelming eurocentrism?
For most students, history has been reduced to a series of unfortunate dates and names that they have to memorize for an exam. So, yeah. Don’t coffee house conversations stay with us longer and give space for our own thoughts? More space to consider one view alongside another?
If the answer is yes, there is a huge possibility that you will find this book well-organized, entertaining, and illuminating. Perhaps not all-encompassing, but that is why it is accessible. Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is a panoramic view, Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes focuses on a specific sequence of events, Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted zooms in and out so that it does not only provide particulars but also a bird’s eye view. All eye-openers, but among the three, I find this to be the most well-written.
I started 2021 with The Silk Roads, 2022 with Destiny Disrupted. This will make a good reading tradition — new year, new eyes. We can use a pair every now and then.
A fascinating overview of the world my mind has been transported to in 2020. Without any intention of underrating the author, I doubt if I would have found this as easy to ingest had I not gone through all the other materials I devoured prior to reading this. The political, religious, and economic landscape already seemed familiar to me by the time I arrived at The Silk Roads.
Aside from agreeing on accounts and facts with the other books I read, and also declaring that it is time we look at history from another perspective; what details the other books chose not to elaborate, this one expounded and vice versa, altogether offering a more detailed and broader picture of history.
In my recent readings, the vastness of how much mainstream history excludes and how it reeks of western bias disturbed me deeply. I felt rather betrayed by history textbooks and it was tempting to shift entirely to an eastern-centric worldview.
But the remarkable thing about seeking to learn more is that it encourages openness, and you ultimately realize that the most wonderful way of viewing the world and history is to study it through not one, not two, but through as many vantage points as possible.
Quoting Peter Frankopan, “There was good reason why the cultures, cities and peoples who lived along the Silk Roads developed and advanced: as they traded and exchanged ideas, they learnt and borrowed from each other, stimulating further advances in philosophy, the sciences, language… As tastes became more sophisticated, so did appetites for information. Alongside increasingly sophisticated tastes came increasingly refined ideas.” History teaches us that this is how cities and cultures thrived, reasoning implies that this is how our minds could flourish.
Iran’s first female judge, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, has penned this affecting book with such free-flowing sincerity that I could not help but cry in a number of passages.
Just as in 2011 when I read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and it made me celebrate my freedom as a reader, Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening is making me celebrate my freedom as a woman as it raises awareness of the many liberties that we often take for granted.
“The world was awake — it wakes early in the East.”
Gertrude Bell’s simple description of a Persian sunrise encapsulates, with figurative overtones, the theme of the books I have been reading lately. In The Silk Roads, she is described as dynamic and fiercely intelligent, brilliant, a mercurial scholar and traveler who knew the region and its people as well as anyone. Portrayed by Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert, she is called a Kingmaker for being influential in drawing up the borders of the new nation of Iraq and in bringing King Faisal to power as its first ruler in 1921. But it was only through Safar Nameh that I was introduced to her writing.
She writes so elegantly with a deep perception of places, people, and the relationship between East and West. She speaks of “the careless optimism of those who seek to pile one edifice upon another, a Western upon an Eastern world, and never pause to consider whether, if it stands at all, the newer will only stand by crushing the older out of all existence.”
This is a tiny book of a hundred pages that I thought I would be able to finish in one coffee break, but the writing is too beautiful that I had to savor the lines over and over again.
And for those times when my mind and soul are exceedingly wide awake in wonder, she has the right words… “The world was too lovely for sleep.”
In contrast to de Botton’s encouraged manner of traveling by allowing art to guide us in our travels and what we pay attention to, Henry Hemming, a British painter and author, ventures to the Middle East and lets his travels guide his art.
He and his companion discovered that each country and their people were immensely different from the other that, as artists, it was now more difficult for them to paint a portrait of what we call the “Middle East.” But this is where the book comes in.
It may not be a complete picture, but it provides a keener understanding, especially at a time when we need it most.
I did not read these books. I inhaled the force of these books — in big and small gasps, and by the end of the third, I could not part with her. I do not think I can ever part with her. You would want to acquire her strength through osmosis!
She is my writer. Belonging to that rare breed who, even when writing about their lives, call attention to matters beyond themselves. Her words insist that you come out of her books knowing more about yourself, about the world.
Indeed, there are authors whose lives are as intense as their books. Nawal El Saadawi is one of them. Writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist, her eventful life consists of losing her job as Director of Public Health Education due to political pressure, being imprisoned as a vocal critic of President Anwar Sadat and released only a month after his assassination, running for the Egyptian presidency in 2004, appearing on an Islamic fundamentalist death list, and being a potential Nobel laureate in literature until her death in March this year.
When it is Doris Lessing herself who says this is something we should all be reading, what is there left for me to say?
Woman at Point Zero & God Dies by the Nile
October 2021
Two books undiluted in their scathing criticism of religious hypocrisy among men and leaders, corruption, and the brutal treatment of women.
Both stories are based on real lives, and these are not to be read if you would rather prevent yourself from seething.
Written in 1973 and 1976, these stories and themes should have already become irrelevant at this point in history.
That they still aren’t is the tragedy.
Searching
April 2022
A Nawal El Saadawi work of fiction is an art film; one where nuanced cinematography captures the reflection of the sun on a window pane and which slowly pans toward the distress coursing through a woman’s veins; one that disquiets with its honesty; one with an unbroken tension that does not resolve, but bleeds into a thousand provoking questions as the end credits fade into darkness.
The Fall of the Imam
August 2022
“No one of you has ever possessed my mind. No one. And no matter how often you took my body my mind was always far away out of your reach, like the eye of the sun during the day, like the eye of the sky at night.”
In a culture where a buffalo has more worth than a woman, where love and marriage are usually two different things, where there is a disconnect between religious devotion and actions, where a man has the freedom to sin but where a woman can get stoned for being a victim, Nawal treads dangerously with her words.
She throws difficult questions at religion and those who are in power, beats us out of complacency and privilege, and prods us to be angry at injustice and inequality.
This is not the book I would recommend to someone who is new to her writings, but a seasoned Nawal reader would probably consider this an epitome of her literary prowess.
Prose-wise, it is the most ornate. Content-wise, it is the most potent. Form-wise, it is her most sophisticated. And wading through all of that is not so easy.
Different narrators for each chapter can get disorienting; the victims narrate, the criminals narrate, so do the dead, and oftentimes about the same incident. When it comes to the women, one can get confused trying to identify whether it is the mother speaking, or the daughter, or the new wife, or the first wife, or the mistress, or the sister. But I realize the intention: It is to emphasize the fact that they are women, and because they are women they suffer all the same.
“Like in The Thousand and One Nights, the beginning of each tale merged with the end of the one which had preceded it, like the night merges with the day…” And then she draws us away from Scheherazade to a lesser-viewed aspect of this literary heritage and culture, and points the spotlight at the hypocrisy of King Shahryar.
Through it all, the question that seems to reverberate loudest in my mind is this: What can we do if the leaders, those who are in power, the ones assigned to mete out judgment, are the perpetrators of the crime?
Because at times, they are. Not only in some culture foreign to us. But in ours, too.
The Hidden Face of Eve
March 2023
The best of Nawal El Saadawi’s books are nonfiction: They reveal the devastating truth that her works of fiction are, in fact, nonfiction.
A vital textbook for the study of women in the Arab world, The Hidden Face of Eve has a more academic structure compared to A Daughter of Isis, Walking through Fire, and her numerous memoirs that are deeply personal. But all her writings perfectly demonstrate how the personal is political, and there is not a hint of the tedium that we might encounter in textbooks.
The delicate preface alone is worth mulling over and digesting; and the book, thorough in the history and status of women in Arab society from pre-Islam days until the present, often enlightening or enraging, should be read in its entirety. Whether one agrees or disagrees with any of her views, no one will close this book without having learned anything substantial. Reading this showed me what a shallow understanding I have of the matter despite years of delving in books from Islamic nations.
Nawal does not launch into an angry tirade against religion, however, but against those who use religion “as an instrument in the hands of economic and political forces,” those who use religion to deprive women of knowledge and suppress the search for truth by intimidation and obscurantism, and those who misinterpret religion and utilize it as an instrument of oppression and exploitation. She challenges that religion, if authentic in the principles it stands for, “aims at truth, equality, justice, love, and a healthy wholesome life for all people, whether men or women.”
She criticizes feminism that is merely an instrument of a specific class, or a feminism that is fanatical and superficial, stressing that fanaticism of any form should be opposed, whether it be religion, political, or social. Interestingly, she even remarks on the “modern” woman, “who thinks that progress is manifested by a tendency to show more and more of her thighs,” but remains mentally and emotionally suppressed under the surface.
She therefore makes a stand for the education of the female child, the strengthening of the mind, a free mind, and a heightened level of consciousness, pointing out that a girl who has lost her personality through the throttling of her mind will lose the capacity “to think independently and to use her own mind,” and “will do what others have told her and will become a toy in their hands and a victim of their decisions.” Thus, “the emancipation of Arab women can only result from the struggle of the Arab women themselves, once they become an effective political force.” As we all know, this does not merely apply to Arab women. There is also the acknowledgement that “progress for women, and an improvement of their status, can never be attained unless the whole of society moves forward.”
Can you see why I wished to greet Women’s History Month by reading someone like Nawal El Saadawi? But because there is no one like Nawal El Saadawi, I read her.
“…with liberation they stand to lose nothing else but their chains…”
Two Women in One
March 2024
While I have long discovered that I prefer the nonfiction writer in Nawal, her fiction remains to be in a class by itself. (That’s why I still continue collecting what I can of her books, fiction and nonfiction, especially now that I’ve discovered these excellent editions — in terms of publication quality and translation — from Saqi Books.)
Two Women in One is not straightforward storytelling. There’s a tinge of Clarice in the free indirect prose. Unsettling, like any piece by Nawal; claustrophobic, and therefore, effective.
It’s not a good place to start if one is new to Nawal. The angst of a young woman, wanting to be an artist but who’s forced into medical school, is potent here.
Conformity becomes suffocating to her, “Everything had the same color and shape to her. All bodies were similar, and all gestures and voices. She found herself running aimlessly… fleeing the deadly sameness within and without…” When she realizes that none of her life is her doing or her own choice, she unleashes a rebellious other woman in her. “Freedom is dangerous, but life without it is no life at all.”
But what I found most powerful in this work is the underlying message that unless Egypt is free, she cannot be free. “Egypt was not free. The chains were still there.” Because when all is said and done, how a nation treats their women, is always a measure of that nation. A woman’s personal freedom is often symbiotic and synonymous with national freedom.
This hypermasculine epic poem might be a startling selection for Women’s Month, but I chose it for the translation. Published in 2017, it is the first translation by a woman since the earliest of the sixty available English translations appeared in 1615!
I grew up with these tales. My maternal Lola was an English and Literature teacher who randomly inserted Odysseus and Greek mythological figures in bedtime stories and conversations as if they were old acquaintances. And so, even with the present-day debate on whether people should continue to read something so sexist by 21st Century standards, The Odyssey remains to have sentimental value to me. Ithaka by Cavafy and Ulysses by Tennyson are not some of my favorite poems for nothing.
But I have to admit that it was only through reading Emily Wilson’s translation that I thoroughly felt a connection with the epic poem. Her language is accessible but she does not sacrifice beauty.
The introduction takes up almost a fifth of the entire book and has maps especially drawn for this volume, informative etymology, and a historical background of the Bronze Age that bids the reader to examine the context that is vastly different from our own. For the first time, I recognize Odysseus for the problematic character that he truly is, and for the first time, I am able to view Helen of Troy in a different and slightly better light — the translator ensuring that she, “like that of the original, refrains from blaming herself for what men have done in her name.” This is not a feminist version but it does not gloss over character defects and instead allows the reader to “see the cracks and fissures in its constructed fantasy.”
Despite what contemporary readers might think, we cannot deny its impact on the history of literature. It has not survived three millennia for nothing. But if there is an edition of The Odyssey a reader of our age should read and keep, I believe it should be this one. As much as it is a timeless celebration of adventure and the longing for home, this translation is most definitely a celebration of Woman.
Reading this is like walking into the vibrance of the color spectrum and ending up enveloped in its deepest and darkest hues.
But which caused the author to be put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. By lending voice to the Armenian characters in the novel, Elif Shafak risked being sentenced to prison. The charges were eventually dropped, but the incident highlights the fearlessness of a Turkish woman brave enough to write about something which, until now, the Turkish government denies — the Armenian Genocide during World War I.
The dialogues between the descendants of the oppressed Armenians and modern-day Turks are moving and revealing on equal sides; the characters are relatable and human; historical facts and astonishing twists leave the reader no choice but to gasp; magic realism effectively subtle; all these, interlaced into the breathtaking and bewitching chaos that is Istanbul make it a triumph of unforgettable and disquieting beauty.
And because the two main characters are readers, there are ruminations on the power of the written word: “Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moonless night in the desert… Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced.”
“The regime had understood that one person leaving her house asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my make-up be seen? Are they going to whip me?
No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?”
“In every religion, you find the same extremists.”
The title takes after the capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, but it is an autobiography presented as a graphic novel written and drawn by the author! The two volumes of Persepolis chronicles the life of Marjane Satrapi growing up in Tehran witnessing the downfall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution, living through the Iran-Iraq War, her high school years in Vienna, and her university life back in Tehran under the Islamic regime.
Persepolis is a memoir, a historical record, a political statement, but also an extraordinarily creative reading experience. Being a newbie to the genre, I had not realized that graphic novels could be this powerful! It is an honest account of a life and a nation, and I admire how it sends out a strong message of how crucial it is to educate oneself to attain freedom, especially the freedom of the mind.
She expounds these thoughts in a later interview with Emma Watson, “I have lived in a dictatorship. There was a ban on everything! Was I less free in my mind? No, I wasn’t. Did I become a stupid person? No, I didn’t. Because no matter how much they looked at me, they could not get into my mind. That belongs to me. And that is under my control if I decide it is. And I can only decide that if I train it. If you don’t use it, it shrinks, and if you use it, it grows. So it is up to us.”
In Volume I, published in 2000, we see a very young Satrapi wishing to be an educated and liberated woman like Marie Curie; and in Volume II, she promises to make her ancestors proud. Remarkably enough, her 2007 animated movie adaptation of Persepolis premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Award. In 2019 she directed the biopic Radioactive starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie. Full circle. Watching both films over the weekend turned out to be yet another excellent toast to Women’s Month!
Aladdin asked, “Who are the associates of devils?” “A prince without learning, a scholar without virtue… the corruption of the world lies in their corruption.”
Twenty pages into this book and it already felt like I was reading Crime and Punishment instead of another variation of the Arabian Nights. Apparently, it is not a retelling of the Arabian Nights but a grim sequel drained of the amusement and is, instead, a disquieting political message and social commentary. It weighs heavily.
Right at the beginning it exposes the false piety and corruption of those who are in power when a man of good social standing commits a heinous crime and the poor are arrested, questioned, and accused, whilst the authorities “believe in mercy even when we are chopping necks and cropping heads.”
Characters of the Arabian Nights appear throughout the book, their lives intertwined, but the genies are not the type that fulfill wishes. Some play fateful pranks and some act like consciences, testing the human capacity for good and evil, or calling out the faults of those in power, “If you are called upon to do good, you claim you are incapable; and if you are called upon to do evil, you set about it in the name of duty.” And those in power justify their deeds by saying, “He who’s too decent goes hungry in this city.”
As Scheherazade intimates to Sultan Shahryar, “The fact that stories repeat themselves is an indication of their truth, Your Majesty.” True enough. We see these stories repeated outside of fiction and right smack in the middle of our lives.
This novel is, indeed, a ratification of Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize.
“Wisdom is a difficult requirement — it is not inherited as a throne is.”
The Book-Butterfly 