Lanterns of the King of Galilee

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

Qandil, King of Galilee, is the seventh novel in his novel project (The Palestinian Farce), along with The Time of White Horses, The Eraser Child, Birds of Caution, Olives of the Streets, Amina's Weddings, and Under the Morning Sun.

With the publication of this novel, the Palestinian comedy has covered a spiritual, national, and humane period spanning 250 years of modern Palestinian history.

The novel "Lanterns of the King of Galilee" was published by the Arab House of Sciences as part of a distinguished list of Arabic novels.

About the book "Lanterns of the King of Galilee"
The novel, The Lanterns of the King of Galilee, is a foundational novel, not only in terms of novelistic writing that travels far into Palestinian time, which here is the end of the seventeenth century and almost the entire eighteenth century (1689-1775), but also in its deeper search for the foundations of the formation of identity and the human self in this region extending between two seas: the Sea of ​​Galilee (Tiberias) and the Sea of ​​Acre.

An epic climax elevates Ibrahim Nasrallah's novelistic project, and the Palestinian comedy project in particular, to a lofty position as he writes the epic of that leader (Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani), who rebelled against Turkish rule and sought to establish the first modern national political entity in Palestine, and the first national entity in the Arab East. This unique leader whose "state" extended from Palestine to many regions beyond it.

The story of Qanadeel Malik Al-Jalil traverses history and illuminates it in a dazzling way with real and imaginary characters, moving between Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Istanbul, mixing history with great values ​​and questions of love, death, destiny and the relationship with nature in its deepest manifestations. It contemplates the spiritual and mythological history of Palestine, while simultaneously rehabilitating a brilliant Palestinian national struggle and a unique historical leader in his understanding of the values ​​of dignity, justice, liberation, the right to life and religious tolerance that reaches an uncommon degree of breadth and nobility.

Ibrahim Nasrallah says in Qanadeel Malik Al-Jalil
There are, Sheikh, lamps that cannot be extinguished, and your lamp is one of them. After all that you have done, do you think anyone can extinguish your lamp? It is true that today no one dares to sit down to write down all the great things you have done, because they fear nothing more than the state, and the state fears nothing more than ink. But in a year or ten or fifty or a hundred, this will change, and your lamp will be lit and all those lamps that were extinguished will be lit, all at once, Sheikh. I am neither a geometer nor a star reader, even though I am a star! But all that will happen, Sheikh.