Middle East Literature in Translation – serie

Winner of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award 2013.Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems brings together in one volume Haddad’s seminal work and a considerable selection of poems from his oeuvre, stretching over forty years. The central poem, Chronicles of Majnun Layla, recasts the seventh-century myth into a contemporary, postmodern narrative that revels in the foibles of oral transmission, weaving a small side cast of characters into the fabric of the poem. Haddad portrays Layla as a daring woman aware of her own needs and desires and not afraid to articulate them. The author succeeds in reviving this classical work of Arabian love while liberating it from its puritanical dimension and tribal overtones.The selected poems reveal Haddad’s playful yet profound meditations. A powerful lyric poet, Haddad juxtaposes classical and modern symbols, and mixes the old with the new, the sensual with the sacred, and the common with the extraordinary. Ghazoul and Verlenden’s masterful translation remains faithful to the cultural and historical context in which the original poetry was produced while also reflecting the uniqueness of the poet’s style and his poetics.

Celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis is a novel deeply rooted in historical and cultural significance inviting readers into a world of revolution, power, and societal transformation. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries. Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh’s story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.

"Like all revolutions, this one too has led to a regime more despotic than the one it replaced." So observes an omniscient narrator in Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s monumental novel The House of the Edrisis, offering a darkly comedic glimpse at the aftermath of an unnamed twentieth-century uprising. In this concluding volume, the revolutionary tumult that has consumed the aristocratic Edrisi family and their opulent mansion shows no signs of abating.As a ragtag band of squatters-turned-rulers consolidates power through surveillance and intimidation, the novel’s eccentric cast of characters is forced to reckon with upended social orders. Erstwhile revolutionaries become complicit enforcers of a new authoritarian regime, their lofty slogans of liberation curdling into doublespeak. At the center of this story stands the ancestral Edrisi manor—a fading palace that seems to contain multitudes. Its once-vibrant gardens and courtyards, rendered in lush descriptive passages, now serve as haunted stages for madness, romance, violence, and philosophical reflection in turn. Lauded as a crowning achievement of modern Persian literature, this first-ever English translation of The House of the Edrisis in two volumes offers an unforgettable immersion in one writer’s vision of the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution.

Set in late 19th and 20th-century Egypt, this novel offers a window on the everyday lives of cloistered women and the way they interact with each other and with male relatives, spouses and other men.

Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. As a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel, suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled utterances through which Jabra Ibrahim Jabra artfully crafts the basis for the narration. He transforms the transcription of the tape by each of Masoud’s comrades into a study of character. Through a series of monologues, each becomes a narrator of his own experience.Readers of The Ship (also translated by Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen) will remember the ingenious way the political themes emerge through the dialogue between passengers on a ship crossing the Mediterranean from the Arab to the European world. This novel echoes identical subjects: the misperceptions between Western and Islamic cultures, personal landscape as a shaper of culture, and the necessity of political commitment.A tour de force that places the evolution of the Faulknerian style into a political register, this book is a testament to the brilliance of one of Palestine’s preeminent writers.

Written over a 50-year period, this work reflects the experiences that have shaped recent Iranian history: revolution and war.

When Palestinian intellectual, Walid Masoud disappears, suspicion arises that he may have gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy tape recording which is transcribed by each of his comrades in a series of monologues narrating their own experiences.

Writing in an intriguingly symbolic and minimalist style, author Sonallah Ibrahim has been called the Egyptian Kafka. And no wonder. This wry take on Kafka’s The Trial revolves around its narrator’s attempts to petition successfully the elusive ruling body of his country, known simply as "the committee." Consequences for his actions range from the absurd to the hideous.In Kafkaesque fashion, Ibrahim offers an unbroken first-person narrative rendered in brief, crisp prose framed by a conspicuous absence of vivid imagery. Furthermore, the petitioner is a man without identity. The ideal anti-hero, he remains, as does his country, unnamed throughout the intricate plot with a locale suggestive of 1970s Cairo.Considered a major work, The Committee sardonically pierces the inflammatory terrain between ordinary men, unbridled displays of power, and other, broader concerns of the author’s native Egypt. The novel’s corrosive, shocking conclusion catapults satiric surrealism into a new realm.

Radwa Ashour skillfully weaves a history of Granadan rule and an Arabic world into a novel that evokes cultural loss and the disappearance of a vanquished population. The novel follows the family of Abu Jaafar, the bookbinderdashhis wife, widowed daughter-in-law, her two children, and his two apprenticesdashas they witness Christopher Columbus and his entourage in a triumphant parade featuring exotic plants and animals and human captives from the New World. Embedded in the narrative is the preparation for the marriage of Saad, one of the apprentices, and Saleema, Abu Jaafar's granddaughterdasha scenario that is elegantly revealed in a number of parallel scenes.As the new rulers of Granada confiscate books and officials burn the collected volumes, Abu Jaafur quietly moves his rich library out of town. Persecuted Muslims fight to form an independent government, but increasing economic and cultural pressures on the Arabs of Spain and Christian rulers culminate in Christian conversions and Muslim uprisings.A tale that is both vigorous and heartbreaking, this novel will appeal to general readers of Spanish and Arabic literature as well as anyone interested in Christian-Muslim relations.

Drawing on stories he heard as a boy from female relatives, Jilali El Koudia presents a cross section of utterly bewitching narratives. Filled with ghouls and fools, kind magic and wicked, eternal bonds and earthly wishes, these are mesmerizing stories to be savoured, studied or simply treasured. Varied genres include anecdotes, legends, and animal fables, and some tales bear strong resemblance to European counterparts, for example Aamar and his Sister (Hansel and Gretel), and Nunja and the White Dove (Cinderella). All capture the heart of Morocco and the soul of its people. In an introduction, El Koudia mourns the loss of the teller of tales in the marketplace, and he makes it clear that storytelling, born of memory and oral tradition, could vanish in the face of mass and electronic media.

Reverend Antûn Rabbât, a respected Jesuit scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discovered these extraordinary writings in a Jacobite diocese in Aleppo, Syria. Rabbât immediately transcribed into Arabic those portions relating to the remarkable experiences of Reverend Elias-al-Mûsili, a priest of the Chaldean Church, the first person ever to come to the Americas from Baghdad. Surrounded by a world seemingly filled with exotic miracles, al-Mûsili shares his perceptions of native peoples, their customs, beliefs, and treatment by Spanish conquistadors. Because of the uniqueness and significance of his journey, al-Mûsili was supported by the pope himself and authorized by the queen regent of Spain. He provides insightful descriptions of high-level officials and clerics in the New World. And he tells of uncommon visits to royalty in Catholic Europe prior to embarking on a voyage that would turn into a twelve-year adventure (1668-1680). Also featured are rare notes culled from a manuscript in a monastery of the Chaldean Christian rite in Baghdad. Aesthetically appealing and historically important, this unique account remains an invaluable document for scholars of early modern history and of the church in Latin America.

In this powerful story of life, love, and the demands of marriage and motherhood, Fariba Vafi gives readers a portrait of one woman’s struggle to adapt to the complexity of life in modern Iran. The narrator, a housewife and young mother living in a low-income neighborhood in Tehran, dwells upon her husband Amir’s desire to immigrate to Canada. His peripatetic lifestyle underscores her own sense of inertia. When he finally slips away, the young woman is forced to raise the children alone and care for her ailing mother. Vafi’s brilliant minimalist style showcases the narrator’s reticence and passivity. Brief chapters and spare prose provide the ideal architecture for the character’s densely packed unexpressed emotions to unfold on the page. Haunted by the childhood memory of her father’s death in the basement of her house while her mother ignored his entreaties for help, the narrator believes she relinquished her responsibility and failed to challenge her mother. As a single parent and head of household, she must confront her paralyzing guilt and establish her independence.Vafi’s characters are emblematic of many women in Iran, caught between tradition and modernity. Demystifying contemporary Iran by taking readers beyond the stereotypes and into the lives of individuals, Vafi is one of the most important voices in Iranian literature. My Bird heralds her eagerly anticipated introduction to an English-speaking audience.

Sait Faik may well be named "the Turkish Chekhov". In Turkey, critics and readers regard him as their finest short story writer. Since his death in 1954 at the age of forty-eight, his stature has grown on the strength of his narrative art, which is both realistic and whimsical with a poetic touch. Suha Oguzertem, a premier authority on Turkish fiction, writes in his introduction to Sleeping in the Forest that "As an anti-bourgeois writer and fierce democrat, Sait Faik has always sided with the underdog" and that no characters remain " 'common' or 'ordinary' once they enter Sait Faik's stories; his piercing gaze and thoughtful vision transform them lovingly into unique beings." Sait Faik's fiction ranges from the realistic to the surrealistic, from the romantic to the modern, from the cynical to the compassionate. With virtuosic skill, he captures the spirit and the spleen of the city of Istanbul and its environs. In evoking the mystery of that great metropolis through such ordinary characters as Armenian fishermen, Greek Orthodox priests, and the disillusioned and disfranchised, he creates for us a marvelous microcosm of tragicomedy. Few writers, in Turkey or elsewhere, command Sait Faik's mastery of the ironic. Sleeping in the Forest features twenty-two stories, an excerpt from a novella, and fifteen poems rendered into English by some of the best-known translators of Turkish literature. Sait Faik's chiaroscuro world is brought into focus by an introductory essay on utopian poetics and lyrical stylistics of this great Turkish writer. The book is a stimulating exploration into Turkish mood and milieu.

This autobiography tells of the early years of a person who, in later life, would become one of Egypt's most influential radical Islamist thinkers. This memoir - a document of substantial historical value - tells of Sayyid Qutb's childhood in the village of Musha in Upper Egypt. The book documents the era between 1912 and 1918 - a decade of immensely important influence on the creation of modern Egypt. Written with much tenderness toward childhood memories, it has become a classic modern Arabic autobiography. The book offers a clear picture of Egyptian village life in the early twentieth century, its customs and lore, educational system, religious festivals, relations with the central government, and the struggle to modernize and retain its identity. Translators John Calvert and William Shepard have captured the beauty and intensity of Qutb's prose in their rendering of the work into English. Their masterly introduction situates the book in its cultural environment and Sayyid Qutb in his historical context. Although Qutb (1906-1966) is not a household name in the United States, he is well known throughout the Islamic World as the foundational thinker for a significant portion of the contemporary Muslim intelligentsia, including such non-Arab countries as Pakistan and Malaysia. In 1965 he published his famous his famous book, Mallem Fittareek (Milestones) after which he was accused of conspiring against the Egyptian president, Abdul Nassar and arrested. He was tried and sentenced to death. A Child From the Village was written just prior to Qutb's conversion to the Islamist cause and reflects his concerns for social justice that would eventually express itself in Islamic terms. There has been an increase in the general public's interest in Qutb since 9/11: he has received attention in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, to name a few.

The story of one woman's passionate odyssey and sophisticated fantasy of Arabia, ancient and modern.

This is a newly translated collection of poetry - in a bilingual edition - by Francophone writer Nadia Tueni, including more than forty selected poems, together with articles on Tueni's work. This book comprises both Christophe Ippolito and Paul B. Kelley's never-before translated Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon and Sam Hazo's English translation of Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love, both by Nadia Tueni. The languages of Rimbaud, Lautreamont and surrealist poetry have had a decisive influence on Tueni's work. But she also owes a great debt on the Arabic side to the Lebanese avant-garde poets who, in turn, influenced by surrealism contributed to what has been called ""a revolution of poetic language"". Her work merges with the poetic and political landscape of her country. Like many Lebanese writers, Tueni was active in political circles, particularly after the war in 1967. This book tells of the suffering - memories of an abandoned garden fading away - and of a poet at the confluence of two cultures: Western and Middle Eastern.

In this noted anthology, the poet Adonis evokes the wisdom of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (which he liberally excerpts and remolds), the modernism of William Carlos Williams, and the haunting urban imagery of Baudelaire, Cavafy, and Lorca. Three long poems allow him to explore profoundly the human condition, by examining language and love, race and favor, faith and dogma, war and ruin. In the lyrical ""This Is My Name"" and ""Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,"" Adonis ponders Arab defeat and defeatism. In ""A Grave for New York,"" he focuses on Vietnam-era America. Originally published in 1970 to widespread acclaim, the collection has been reprinted often but has never before appeared in English. Enhanced by Shawkat M. Toorawa's bilingual edition of the Arabic and English on facing pages, an afterword, and assisted by a critical bibliography of Adonis's works, this book is a crucial reference for all students and scholars of modern and Middle Eastern poetry and culture. Noted Syrian intellectual Nasser Rabbat offers a compelling foreword.

Set in Geneva, Switzerland, around the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, this intricately plotted novel probes the emotional misfortunes of Arab men and women fleeing the horror of war only to find their ways of life constantly challenged by their foreign surroundings. The author's scalding critique of the Lebanese situation resonates with strong sociopolitical issues. Here are telling portraits of class oppression and the role of women in Arab society, the treatments of war and sexuality, of immigration, of cultural assimilation and nationalism. With supreme artistry and insight - and in modern Arab literary fashion - Ghada Samman skillfully blends realism with fantasy into a highly stylized, thematically multilayered tale. It is at once a Gothic romance and a suspenseful whodunit with engaging characters. At the same time it is a gripping study of social injustice and the consequences of wartime upheaval. Far from home and out of harm's way, Samman's Lebanese exiles repeat and replay the very same conflicts that torment them in their own land even as it is under siege. Night of the First Billion is an eloquent reminder that the only genuine security in the most profound and human sense of the word is to be found in the courageous willingness to confront, challenge, and finally to ease suffering.

The earliest Turkish verses, dating from the sixth century A.D., were love lyrics. Since the love has dominated the Turks' poetic modes and moods - pre-Islamic, Ottoman classic, folk, modern. In style, form and sensibility, this collection offers a broad spectrum: virtual all types and varieties are represented here. The English versions are loyal to the originals and strive to be authentic poems in English. Here are lyrics from pre-Islamic Central Asia, passages from epics, mystical ecstasies of such thirteenth-century figures as Rumi and Yunus Emre, classical poems of the Ottoman Empire (including Suleyman the Magnificent and women courtly poets), lilting folk poems and the work of the legendary communist Nazim Hikmet (who is arguably Turkey's most famous poet internationally) and the greatest living Turkish poet, Fazil Husnu Daglarca. The verses in this collection are true to the Turkish spirit as well as universal in the appeal. They show how Turks praise and satirize love, how they see it as a poetic experience Poetry was for many centuries the premier Turkish genre and love its predominant them Some of the best expressions of that happy coalescence can be found in this volume.

While the fading autumn sun sped toward the horizon, the young boys headed home - they were not used to trying to see at night without the moon's glow. So begins this uncoventional, hauntingly mythic novel. In the tradition of magical-realism, author Ibrahim Abdel Megid crafts a tale steeped in symbolism. Writing in a shimmering lyrical style he brings alive the dreams, customs, and everyday concerns of people living in historic obscurity on the fringe of the glitzy, petrodollar kingdoms of the Middle East. The tale begins on a worksite in Egypt's western desert. Here, in the middle of nowhere, railway men and locals wait in hope for the annual return of a ""distant train."" When last it came this vehicle brought with it foreigners, soldiers - and economic opportunity; then it stopped. Each of Megid's characters is allegorical in nature. Each part of the novel is framed by memory and the way remembrance takes shape and affects the characters. The story's main characters are time and place. Yet its dramatic thrust is the way in which place gives rise to history through the passage of time and the rise and fall of settlement. ""Distant Train"" reaffirms Megid's status as a new, imaginative, and distinct voice in the field of narrative literature and the time-honored arena of storytelling.

The distinguished Middle Eastern author Raja Alem grew up in Mecca at a time when the holy city was on the cusp of transformation from medieval to modern. In this vanished Mecca, vividly brought to life again in ""My Thousand and One Nights"", women hold center stage - especially Jummo, the wildly passionate daughter of the Water Carriers' Sheik. This faraway time and setting become compellingly real through the intimate drama of Jummo's life, the tragic arc of her affair with her childhood sweetheart and her lifelong love for the mysterious Sidi Wadhana, a more-than-human emissary from the Netherworld. Jummo's world, veiled and invisible to outsiders until this telling of her story, has the feel of the true center of an Arabia that has come to us in many exotic and threatening guises. ""Jummo's Mecca"" is a different world, with different narrative strategies, but her dramatic problems are universal: how lethal is love, how dangerous is woman? And how sensual is the yearning for immortality?

Return to Dar al-Basha by the contemporary Tunisian author Hassan Nasr depicts the childhood of Murtada al-Shamikh and his return forty years later to his home in the medina or old city of Tunis. After being taken from his mother and raised in his father's home where he was physically abused and emotionally marginalized, Murtada spends a life of anxiety wandering the world. His return is prompted by a mysterious visit from one of his father's Sufi friends as he roams the desert in Mauritania. Murtada retraces his steps through the medina to his family's house in anticipation of a possible reunion with his troubled father, vividly reliving sights, smells, and sounds from his childhood and evoking his childhood initiation into Islamic mysticism as he experiences a personal journey of the spirit across space and time. Nasr succeeds in conjuring up a Tunisian boyhood not unlike his own and brings to life in a poetic, sensual narrative the spaces, light, colors, and life of Tunis some six decades ago. Murtada searches the streets of Tunis and his memories for the decisive mistake he feels he must have made - that has left him a perpetual wanderer until he undergoes a cathartic nightmare sequence that leaves him shaken. Only then is he finally able to come to peace with his past and with himself. In William M. Hutchins' lucid translation serves as an evocation and tribute to the historic city of Tunis the novel and meditates about the position of the past in a rapidly modernizing society.

The first anthology of its kind in the West, ""Contemporary Iraqi Fiction"" gathers work from sixteen Iraqi writers, all translated from Arabic into English. Shedding a bright light on the rich diversity of Iraqi experience, Shakir Mustafa has included selections by Iraqi women, Iraqi Jews now living in Israel, and Christians and Muslims living both in Iraq and abroad.While each voice is distinct, they are united in writing about a homeland that has suffered under repression, censorship, war, and occupation. Many of the selections mirror these grim realities, forcing the writers to open up new narrative terrains and experiment with traditional forms. Muhammad Khodayyir's surrealist portraits of his home city, Basra, in an excerpt from Basriyyatha and the magical realism of Mayselun Hadi's ""Calendars"" both offer powerful expressions of the absurdity of everyday life. Themes range from childhood and family to war, political oppression, and interfaith relationships. Mustafa provides biographical sketches of the writers and an enlightening introduction chronicling the evolution of Iraqi literature.

Widely known throughout the Arab world as a leading poet, journalist, and literary critic, Abbas Beydoun's writing is infused with the politics and culture of his native Lebanon. In ""Blood Test"", his first novel, Beydoun recounts the efforts of a young man to explore his own history and identity through his encounters with the family and friends who surround him. The sudden death of his father prompts him to follow the physical and psychological traces he left behind, a journey that raises as many questions as it answers. The young man's search for a sense of belonging and rootedness leads him both forward and back as the narration travels in time and place over two continents and several generations.Max Weiss' fluid translation effortlessly conveys Beydoun's impassioned language and textured storytelling. ""Blood Test"" is a passport to places both real and imagined, leaving readers enriched by their travels.

Set during the Lebanese civil war, this novel chronicles the splintering of the Al-Mukhtars, a Lebanese family whose love and trust for one another is strained by the increasing economic, social, and psychological tensions that surround them. Huda, feeling helpless as a housewife, pursues a career as a university professor and immerses herself in her work and students. Sharif, trapped in a static bureaucratic position, begins to resent his wife's success and slowly withdraws from his family. When their marriage dissolves, the couple fight over the custody of their adolescent daughter. In a patriarchal society that favors the rights of the father, Huda is powerless as her daughter is taken from her. Through the author's use of flashbacks, the reader witnesses the stark contrast between the young, idealistic couple and the older husband and wife, who have become increasingly isolated and disillusioned. Narrated through the voices of several characters, ""Canceled Memories"" depicts a Lebanese family seeking to maintain love and trust for each other despite the destructive and corrupting effects of war. Nadine Sinno's fluent translation introduces a wider audience to one of Lebanon's finest contemporary writers.

In this powerful story of life, love, and the demands of marriage and motherhood, Fariba Vafi gives readers a portrait of one woman's struggle to adapt to the complexity of life in modern Iran. The narrator, a housewife and young mother living in a low-income neighborhood in Tehran, dwells upon her husband Amir's desire to immigrate to Canada. His peripatetic lifestyle underscores her own sense of inertia. When he finally slips away, the young woman is forced to raise the children alone and care for her ailing mother. Vafi's brilliant minimalist style showcases the narrator's reticence and passivity. Brief chapters and spare prose provide the ideal architecture for the character's densely packed unexpressed emotions to unfold on the page. Haunted by the childhood memory of her father's death in the basement of her house while her mother ignored his entreaties for help, the narrator believes she relinquished her responsibility and failed to challenge her mother. As a single parent and head of household, she must confront her paralyzing guilt and establish her independence. Vafi's characters are emblematic of many women in Iran, caught between tradition and modernity. Demystifying contemporary Iran by taking readers beyond the stereotypes and into the lives of individuals, Vafi is one of the most important voices in Iranian literature. My Bird heralds her eagerly anticipated introduction to an English-speaking audience.

From Orhon inscriptions to Orhan Pamuk, the story of Turkish literature from the eighth century A.D. to the present day is rich and complex, full of firm traditions and daring transformations. Spanning a geographic range from Outer Mongolia and the environs of China through Inner Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa, the Balkans and Europe all the way to North America, the history of Turkish literature encompasses an amalgam of cultural and literary orientations that embraced such traditions and influences as Chinese, Indian, Turkic, Mongolian, Uyghur, Russian, Arabo-Persian, Islamic, Sufi, Judaeo-Christian, Greek, Mesopotamian, Roman, Byzantine, European, Scandinavian, North American, and Latin American. Always receptive to the nurturing values, aesthetic tastes, and literary penchants from diverse civilizations, Turkish culture succeeded in evolving a sui generis personality. It clung onto its own established traits; yet, it was flexible enough to welcome innovations—or even revolutionary change. A Millennium of Turkish Literature tells the story of how literature evolved and grew in stature on the Turkish mainland in the course of a thousand years. The book features numerous poems and extracts, most in fluid translations by Talat S. Halman. This volume provides a concise, but captivating, introduction to Turkish literature and, with selections from its extensive ""Further Reading"" section, serves as an invaluable guide to Turkish literature for course adoption.

Award-winning novelist Bensalem Himmich’s third novel to be translated into English is a vertiginous exploration of one of Islam’s most radical thinkers, the Sufi philosopher Ibn Sab‘in. Born in Spain, he was forced to immigrate to Africa because of his controversial views. Later expelled from Egypt, Ibn Sab‘in made his way to Mecca, where he spent his final years. Himmich follows the philosopher’s journey, outlining an array of characters he meets along the way who usher in debates of identity and personal responsibility through their interactions and relationships with Ibn Sab‘in. Set against the backdrop of a politically charged thirteenth-century Islamic world, Himmich’s novel is a rich blend of fact and imagination that re-creates the intellectual debates of the time. As the culture of prosperity and tradition was giving way to the chaos created by political and social instability, many Arabs, as Ibn Sab‘in does in the novel, turned inward toward a spiritual search for meaning. In his fictional portrait of Ibn Sab‘in, Himmich succeeds in creating a character, with his many virtues and flaws, to whom all readers can relate.

Shajar al-Durr, known as Tree of Pearls, was one of the most famous Arab queens and the only woman in the medieval Arab world to rule in her own name. Her narrative is one element of a much larger story of the unsettled political climate of thirteenth-century Egypt. In this eponymous novel, Zaydan charts the fall of the Ayyubid Dynasty and the rise of the Mamluke Dynasty through the adventures of Tree of Pearls and Rukn al- Din Baybars, a young Mamluke commander who eventually triumphs as the ruler of Egypt. War, political intrigue, murder, and a female ruler who was born a slave combine for an irresistible story, while Zaydan’s keen observations on royal politics and subverted gender roles offer readers a richly detailed glimpse of the cultural milieu of the time. Tree of Pearls, originally published in 1914, is the last in a famous series of historical novels written by Zaydan, an accomplished historian whose books continue to be read widely in the Arab world today. Selim’s fluid translation introduces an English audience to one of the Arab world’s influential writers.