the curse

Suha Mustafa

Syrian writer Suha Mustafa navigates political and religious stages of Islamic history. While she focuses on the Ottoman Empire, she also returns to important stages of the Islamic caliphate and states: the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Mamluk. These periods bear similar characteristics, most notably the expulsive tendency toward certain minorities. She also reaches back to a more distant past, drawing on poetic, religious, and historical references, some of which hail from the pre-Islamic cultural heritage.
In this chronological journey, the author shatters the solid aura of history through two main characters belonging to two different eras: Hamama, who was born in the Syrian countryside at the beginning of the last century, while bearing the scars of a previous life during which she witnessed the bloody Ottoman massacres against the Alawites in Aleppo, until she was killed in the massacre of the hills in 1514; and Ramia, a slave girl in the palace of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I "the Decisive", who led those massacres.
Thus, the two biographies intersect. Two women confront the restrictions and destinies imposed on people, especially women, and sacrifice their lives to freedom and rebellion, paying a heavy price for their convictions.