Zoul Allah

In the novel Sister of Purity

Author's name: Nizar Shaqroun

Nothing can dispel the obsession with death from those fearful of fate except meaning. The key to the meaning of the present may lie suspended on a deferred horizon or in a buried past, between the folds of books, tablets, or stone surfaces, waiting to be spoken. But can a single person decipher the mysteries of meaning, or does he need a network of loyal aides to help him spell out its letters and manage his affairs if he finds himself between the hammer of power and the anvil of the jurists?

It's as if the characters in this novel are ghosts in the wind of meaning, present and absent, however the winds of narration and its exhausting questions move them, leaving nothing but their traces, and every present breathes into the trace of an absent one. Isn't writing a call to absence? "Zoul Allah" would not have been able to narrate some chapters of the human biography in this stricken homeland were it not for a sister in the network of assistants, a copyist who was preoccupied, as were her pure brothers, with the matter of preserving the past for fear of the Tatars of the age. He came dragging him to the shop, born anew that day, having escaped the jaws of authority, so the shop became a storehouse of stories and a meeting place for the arts, even an operations and planning room, not for a party group or a religious sect, but for new brothers of purity who gathered on free thought and faith in humanity, so they found no lifeline before them except departure, and the house of peace forgot to be the house of peace