In Sefer HaYashar, also known as the “Book of the Upright,” whose oldest surviving version dates to the ninth century, the story of Abraham and the axe appears again, but with a slight alteration.

The smashing of the idols does not occur in a public temple. It happens inside his father’s house, so it’s not a public performance, but something more intimate and domestic, an eternal and repetitive struggle between a son and his father. The conflict ends, as such conflicts often do, in rupture—either the son abandons the house of his father, or the father casts him out. In this case, the young Abraham left and chose to wander into the desert, following voices no one else can hear.

In the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling, in which he imagines an old teenager who left his home, then when he grew old and became a father, he took his son on a journey to the hidden place in the desert belly to sacrifice him.

Kierkegaard multiplies possibilities. Abraham receives the command to kill his son, an act that, by every ethical standard, is indefensible. The moment he leaves the house, accompanied by his son —Isaac in the Jewish and Christian traditions, Ishmael in the Islamic one— Abraham becomes, in purely moral terms, a man intending to commit a terrible crime.

Kierkegaard insists this does not make him immoral. Abraham has suspended the ethical in favor of a singular, absolute relation to God.

Obedience to the divine exceeds ordinary moral law.

From here, Kierkegaard advances to what he calls the “absolute duty toward God.” Authentic faith, he argues, is not grounded in rational comprehension or conventional ethics. It requires what he famously names the “leap of faith.”

Abraham’s leap binds him to a higher obligation, an obligation not to society, nor to universal morality, but to his faith, to the God that only he can hear his voice.

But what about Abraham’s silence? Why did he conceal the command of sacrifice from his wife and his son?

If Abraham is a believer who has transcended ethics, why did he not possess the moral courage to speak openly? Weren’t the wife and the son believers as well? Why did the three of them not share this ordeal of faith?

Søren Kierkegaard thought of Abraham’s act not as an ethical betrayal or cowardice, but as a religious necessity.

The experience, for Kierkegaard, cannot be translated into language or explained through human logic.

True faith, as he presents it in Fear and Trembling, is an entirely singular relation between the individual and God. It does not require justification before others; in fact, it usually resists such justification.

As Abraham walks toward the mountain, leading the son destined for sacrifice, he recalls the promise: that he will have descendants, that his lineage will inherit the land God pledged to him. God has commanded him to kill his son. God has also promised him children and wealth. These two claims cannot be reconciled logically. Yet Abraham does not attempt to resolve the contradiction. He believes—despite the impossibility of explanation. Even if he were to kill his son, God would not break His promise; somehow, the son would be restored.

- God commands him to sacrifice his son.

- God promises him a great and enduring lineage.

Faith, here, becomes a force that surpasses human reason, what Kierkegaard calls the “sacred absurd.”

A title suitable for the Iron Age, and for the era of monotheism that extends with unstoppable absurdity to our current living moment.

***

The message he carried was not addressed to the world, but only to his descendants: Ishmael and Isaac. Two branches of the same tree contending for millennia over an inheritance never witnessed, never notarized, never entered into any ledger of estates.

His legacy was a promise as vague as a dream, inscribed in the desert air. It became a book, then a discourse, and eventually an armed political nightmare.

What began as a metaphor hardened into a constitution. The dream acquired borders. Prophecy turned into policy. A compact between a human being and a god mutated into a nuclear doctrine that determines who has the right to survive.

Once, they fought with sticks and horses. Now one holds the bomb, and the other is a child emerging from a tent, looking up at the sky, asking God —why?

“Aren’t you going to tell me whose blood that is on your shirt?” he said.

Though wide awake, her voice came soft as a sleepwalker’s:

She had finished work at the hospital and taken a taxi over to Manyal, to the studio where Ahmed was rehearsing with the group. Then the taxi got stuck in traffic on the bridge: no one moving and no one knowing why. And then she’d heard the gunshots, and the gas was fired.

From the taxi she watched a demonstration lofting portraits of the elected civilian president, guarded on either flank by a row of young men holding clubs; looking back she could see a second demonstration, chanting against the murshid while the stood police idle in the rear. Agitated, the driver swivelled round and started to mutter prayers as the president’s demonstration advanced towards them, and through the window she could see them, old men and young, girls in hijabs, all toting pictures of the president and all chanting a confusion of chants cut into by the car horns blare.

Then the gunshots, then gas and smoke.

The president’s supporters stampeded back as canisters dropped around the taxi. She rushed to close the window as the bullets’ whine grew louder, and then the taxi’s back window was blown in and rained all over her. An hysterical scream from the driver, then she saw him opening his door, getting out, and running away. She made herself stay calm, and wrapped the shawl she had on over her mouth and nose. The reek of the gas hit her as she opened the car door and got out, to find herself on what was once the sidewalk over the bridge and was now a battlefield, while down below Nile boats drifted along the river, aglow and pumping out mahregenat. Through the smoke she saw a party of young men and women dancing joyfully aboard the blare and glare of one boat, and wished she could be with them. But here, she was, on the bridge, caught between two mutually hostile demonstrations.

Now gunfire was being exchanged between the two sides. Ducking down, she began to make her way between the ranks of stationary cars, but had only managed to advance past two when she saw a young man, still beardless, holding what looked to be a homemade shotgun. He was taking cover behind a car, hunched round his makeshift weapon. It was a matter of moments to plan out a path away from him, but before she could move he was on his feet and screaming, “Victory or martyrdom, you sons of dogs! Sons of dogs, it’s victory or martyrdom”. Booom! He dropped at her feet. Farah froze. The boy wasn’t dead. He had fallen on his side and his eyes were locked on Farah’s as the blood ran from his chest and neck. There was a snoring sound, the sound a slaughtered calf makes when it can’t cry out or breathe, drowning in its blood. She felt the bile rising from her stomach and nearly vomited her last meal, but clamping her hand over her mouth she held still and slowed her breathing until the urge went away.

The gunfire quieted and, here and there, cars on the bridge were beginning to move. Farah needed a few minutes to get past the shock. The boy’s gun was on the ground beside her, the boy’s eyes were pleading, the boy’s hand was outspread. She crawled over, turned him over on his back, and tried to remember her basic first aid. She examined his chest. There was more than one wound here, but it was from his neck that the bright red blood was running, and she removed her shawl and bound it around his neck, pressing down on the wound to stem the flow of blood. His body shuddered, a series of tremors, then arched and lifted. She tried calming him, but there was only that snore in response. She lifted her head to look for help. The cars were all moving off the bridge and now the opposition demonstration was moving closer. There were many more of them than the other march, and their front ranks were sprinting full pelt after the retreating supporters of the legitimately elected president.

The rest were strolling happily along, stirred by patriotic fervour, faces shining with hope, glowing after their victory in the battle of the bridge. Not one of them turned to Farah or the boy who lay dying in her arms. He clutched at her wrist as though afraid this cheery river of revolutionary patriotism might snatch her up and carry her off.

As she checked him for other injuries, she was soothing him, addressing him: “Don’t stress now, just breathe slowly.”

Addressing passers-by: “Anyone got water?”

Addressing the heavens.

Addressing the asphalt that kept her from the water in the river below.

And no one answered.

The triumphant demonstrators were surging forwards, singly and in knots, carrying Egyptian flags, signs mocking the president, others mocking the murshid, yet others calling for unity or emblazoned with sectarian slogans. Surging forwards, and now surging around her, and into her. One demonstrator tripped over legs of the injured boy and fell, then picked himself up and went on walking. Mirrored in Farah’s eyes, the comrades on the hard march, the vista of great gatherings and processions. She called and no one turned. There were so many of them now that they were trampling on the boy, and she was trying to keep them off him, but they just stumbled into and over her. She watched their soles press into the open wounds and step off again, printing blood as they went.

She screamed and they thought she was chanting. Two young men grabbed her legs and hoisted her up, chanting with her, “Enough! Get back!” and she was afraid they were going to assault her and she kicked out at them, slipping free of the arms that held her up and the fingers gripping her thighs, and they left her there and went off with their revolution and their cries.

She looked for the boy’s body, turned round and round, but she could not see him. Then she tried to get back to where she’d been, but the current tugged her on with the strength of a nation and she found herself carried entirely off the bridge, covered in blood and tears and revolutionary sweat.

. She finished her story with the tears cutting two rivers over her cheeks, and reddened nose and eyes. To Nasseem she seemed the most beautiful and most powerless thing there was, and fresh waves of emotion and agitation broke over him. This time there was no erection to deal with, no tortured conscience; he moved closer and she threw herself into his arms, then burst into tears, and between choked breaths cursed everything and anything: this country, her life, her work, the bad decisions she’d made, family. He held her, wanting to lift all the pain from her, to restore the smile he’d seen in her photos from the summer, wishing a dust storm would engulf Cairo and bring the whole world to an end and spare no one but them.

If only they didn’t have such an intertwined and complex past together. If only they could have a new beginning, a chance to know one another again, and differently. If only the future couldn’t be guessed at, if only she hadn’t witnessed death, if only he hadn’t been visited by grief, if only neither of them were here, in this country.

If only the sea was still blue.

Then the chime sounded for a message and she pulled away, leaving his shirt damp with her tears. She stared at the mobile’s screen then tossed it away. In her eyes, the tears hung motionless, her weeping stopped. She turned to him:

“Oh yes, and it looks like Ahmed and I will be getting a divorce.”

He spoke without realising he’d spoken:

“Really? Congratulations.”

At the age of 13, I became addicted to stealing from other writers. It is what I call literary kleptomania. It started after I fell in love for the first time. She had green eyes, and I didn’t know what to do with the hungry fire inside me, so I fell ill with a fever. My grades were declining. My grandfather visited me, checked my temperature, and left a small book next to my bed. It was a study of Abu Nuwas, an Arabic poet (c. 756–814) famous for his poems on alcohol, love, homosexuality, and other sins.

In bed, with a new notebook, I started to copy the lines of poetry that drew me in. I recovered from the love fever in a week. But I never recovered from my addiction to copying the work of other writers. I would go to the library and wander around, flipping through the books, not looking for something to read but for the jewelry hidden inside them. Sometimes it was a paragraph written in a style that was new to me, sometimes a sentence that blazed, sometimes a single word I was learning for the first time. I never cared about ideas, or plot, or themes. They were pebbles on the road; the true hidden diamonds were the words and phrases whose true power was hidden. Look, for example, at this jewel that I stole recently: “Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.” Because of it, I learned about the beautiful tree Laburnum, and its golden flowers in spring, which become pods in autumn, perfect as a metaphor or something to recycle to write a colorful picture. I will not tell you, of course, who I stole from, although any reader of American poetry might recognize her in those lines.

There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: “Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet.” That is what I have been trying to do all these years in Arabic and English. I convince myself that I forget what I memorize, but ghosts of writers and people I stole from keep chasing me.

I am a thief, good at hiding what I take, memorizing it, until it flows in my bloodstream, so no one can tell where the blood comes from, or which writers I stole from. Still, in most of my books, I have a list of writers that I stole from, to thank them.

A fear laden with advice such as Listen to what you’re told, Walk the line, Stay out of trouble, If a bully stops you don’t fight him and give him all you’ve got, Eat up or the food you leave on your plate will run after you on Judgment Day, If you masturbate you’ll go blind and weaken your knees, Say please, Say Alhamdulillah, Don’t discuss politics, Wear an undershirt,” etc, etc, etc, and before you know it, Boom! You’ve reached adolescence and you learn the necessity of stepping out of a traffic officer’s way should you encounter him in the street, concealing your identity from those you talk to, and never discussing religion with anyone, so that by early adulthood you find that your practical experience with fear up to that point has earned you the ability to practice life fully with it constantly by your side: You make love to your girlfriend whilst surrounded by multiple fears that begin with the neighbors potentially breaking in to the house, being stopped by a police officer in the street, a ripped condom, your friend returns home before you two are finished, for her female cousin to learn of your affair, or her mother’s male cousin to encounter the two of you together, and yet in spite of all these fears, Arab love stories persist and grow; we marry, we procreate and we separate.

A total life spent in the company of fear, for who are we to refuse the fear or rebel against it?

We are a people who consume fear instead of croissants with our coffee;

Do you know what I’m trying to say? Never mind, let’s start at the beginning one more time. And yet, there is no beginning point to return to, I am in the middle, stuck with fear in a hole whose walls are screens that display urban landscapes, and stunning images of nature from the North American continent.

Thanks to the Internet, long time ago… I mastered the art of concealment pretty early on.

The Internet proved to be my hole in the wall, a way out of the isolatory cells that fear erects between individuals. In a time before social media and virtual identification, I, like everyone else, used my fair share of pseudonyms to establish my first social relationships away from family and school. As I wrote and published under many borrowed names, without the knowledge of my family or even my closest friends, I not only found my voice and writing style, but I fell in love with writing anonymously. However, when I finally chose to pursue a career in literary journalism, the detachment I had maintained between my hidden persona and the public one quickly disintegrated, until the wall totally caved in between Iblis (Satan) — my pseudonym at the time — and Ahmed Naji.

Subsequently, nearly every encounter I have had with someone who knew about my writings on the Internet, would inject their comments with words such as “young,” “quiet” and “unassuming” as if attempting to reconcile the two personas was proving too difficult. Suffice to say, that with ‘Satan’ put to rest, my name, Ahmed Naji, is what I go by on all social media platforms.

I left Egypt alone. A writer with no affiliation to any political organization, wandered astray from my religious and national groups. However, once I arrived in America, this lost all value and meaning, for no sooner had I presented myself at the terminal gates did I not only receive the official government stamp, but left the airport branded with a whorish array of labels that I never got to have a say in choosing nor could make sense of.

Soon, however, the minutiae of daily life in exile compels one, especially in the field of writing and cultural work, to gradually adapt to those labels invisibly branded on one’s backside. I recall that it was during my first few months in the country that someone asked me a question in which they referred to me as a brown writer —a term I was unfamiliar with at the time — and it was only after I asked for further explanation during which the same person stammered and fumbled to present me with an adequate answer that I finally understood it to be a term directed at writers who did not belong to the white or black race.

I admit I was taken aback at first, but then I too gradually came round to accept the label as normal and life moved on, as all matters do, in the United States.

I have found that obedience and conformity in the United States are not strictly enforced or heavily guarded by armed soldiers or prisons, instead they present as a whisper, a sound vibration that crashes into your consciousness where they transform into ants that proceed to slowly and gradually eat away at your insides until they ultimately deform you after which they proceed to build you back up and mold you into what the system determines what you should become.

Eventually, I began to introduce myself as a brown writer, to discuss the collective of Brown Writers and to pepper my speeches with the exact labels I had balked at receiving upon my arrival to the country. In the US, I have, alhamdulilah, become a writer who is Brown, Muslim, Arab, Arab American, North African, and occasionally African. And, thank the Lord, I continue to amass titles and identities for they are the keys to grants, jobs, education and life. Yes. There it is, the deceit, yet again, only this time it appears to face a new kind of fear.

Besides, who are you?

Do you deny that you are a brown writer?

Do you deny your ethnic origins?

And why do you criticize Arab Americans?

Are you ashamed of your tribe?

How ungrateful of you. However, if you do not identify as Arab, then why speak for them?

If you do not identify as queer, then why discuss anal fucking? You have no right to that conversation. Except of course you do because freedom of expression is after all guaranteed for all. However, if you do choose to talk about something like your deference to consumers of fisikh (a certain type of fish in Egypt) for example, then you better make sure you actually eat them yourself or else it would seem that you are stealing someone else’s voice and appropriating their space. And what about residency papers and a work permit? Not until you prove you can indeed assimilate by ceding that you are a brown writer, an Arab, a Muslim, she/them/he/her. Listen to me, you sons of bitches, I was breastfed on trickery with mama’s milk, nothing is simpler than for me to lie my way through your stipulations and conditions.

The first time I used the Internet, I was twelve years old. In September I turned 36. Last year, for the first time, I became afraid of the Internet. More than once, I caught myself posting on Facebook or Twitter, only to return to my posts days, sometimes hours later, to delete or hide them in the archives. Although what I write does not touch upon politics, religion, or any of the prohibitions, yet fear, the kind of which I have not experienced until now, overwhelms me and compels me to erase what I’ve written.

The fact that I never did this when I was living in Egypt scares me. It frightens me even more that I don’t know the source of my fear, its cause or where it comes from. In Egypt, the sources of terror were known and one was cognizant of the limits of their reach and thereby they could be circumvented.

However, in exile, fear springs from within; from the temporary identity papers that they give you, from the invisible shifting land under your feet, from your alienation, not only from the place and the social and cultural environment in which you grew up, but from your estrangement from the self you spent a lifetime building and now barely recognize.

I glance behind me and see my tracks, but cannot see me.

Forced migration is like an axe that incessantly hacks away at a writer’s work and literary style. In my early days, my optimism level was almost sky-high. I thought of immigration as an opportunity for a new beginning, and who among us does not like new beginnings? Unbeknownst to me that it would instead prove to be the start of my “great wander.”

The more one familiarizes oneself with the processes and ways that cultural institutions in the country of exile operate, the more one realizes the impossibility of starting over, of reproducing oneself anew as well as the impossibility of reclaiming the old self. And thus began my steep descent into the depths of a labyrinth in which I felt like someone had stripped me of ownership of my language and erased the historical dimension and the geographical context from which my knowledge derives its strength. It’s when life’s necessities present themselves that the chasm further deepens for a writer in search of a new voice and yet is obliged to practice within a cultural machine that provides marginal spaces for immigrants to exist, thereby pushing everyone to compete with other foreign writers like themselves over what little scraps they can secure.

Under such circumstances, exiled writers are wary of rebelling against the system, straying from the conventions of proper writing, or even throwing in the towel altogether for fear of losing their only source of income, forced to join the crowds of other immigrants scrambling to find work. Many a time I’ve asked myself why I cling to my profession after all the heartache it has brought me. I surmise I’d make more in a month working as an Uber driver or supermarket employee than I’d make in a lifetime of writing before sobering to ask myself: What after eight hours of physical work a day and scheduled visits to a psychiatrist to numb the internal pain to prevent me from taking my own life, would remain of me?

Are you having panic attacks?

How do you feel about meditation? The situation is precarious, so a visit to a doctor or a psychiatrist may save you from all your pain and existential questions.

I refuse to visit any medical professional unless physical symptoms appear on my body. As expatriates, it is my reasoning that we must approach psychiatry with caution. However, this is not an invitation for you to share in my contempt of the profession, but advice for you to exhibit caution should you decide to give it a go.

I believe that the ultimate goal of psychiatry, as a byproduct of modernity, is to help individuals overcome their paradoxes and mental anxieties, averting them from causing harm to themselves and others thereby allowing them to live in harmony within their surroundings.

It is worthwhile noting that the accumulation of knowledge in psychiatry is based on decades of study and analysis of individuals born and raised within nation-states as well as institutions of liberal modernity with the aim of helping these individuals to become active members of their community. In essence, psychiatry did not develop to deal with immigrants and expatriates, and is therefore incapable of bridging the gap between immigrants and the new societies they find themselves in, as it was never designed at its core to ever acknowledge them.

That said, it becomes less surprising to learn that some of the consequences to this oversight in the system is the sharp rise in suicides among immigrants when compared to the total population, closely followed by psychological and emotional trauma. And supposing that an immigrant were able to secure the legal and professional status necessary to acquire health insurance, then begins the even more despicable journey of visits to psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, who not only cannot speak foreign languages but also have little, if any, understanding of their patients’ culture and thereby serve no purpose but to deepen the emotional rift lodged within the immigrant.

And yet, under the pressure of hope for survival, the immigrant, now turned patient, fumbles under a foreign language to communicate, striving to rebuild a new self from the psychoanalyst’s sofa. I ask you, what could this health professional offer someone like you who has lived through war, rebellion and prison when he knows nothing about them? Will he really solve your problems with his foreign diagnostics and treatment protocols? Do you honestly believe that the road to your salvation can only begin after you succumb to mimicking the symptoms of a psychoanalytic diagnosis imposed upon you? Is the analyst’s role simply to guide you into talking your way to a more civilized, culturally amenable self than the one you arrived with and which the new system expects you to shed and leave behind? Might not your belief in the psychoanalytic process be a byproduct of expressing yourself in a language other than your mother tongue?

I recall an incident with one psychoanalyst who launched into a long-winded explanation on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), suggesting coping mechanisms regurgitated in many a self-help book and the novels of Paolo Coelho. I sat, restraining my frustration, plastering on my face a polite immigrant smile before I was finally able to thank him for his truly enlightening speech but without failing to explain in return that indeed the operative words in his diagnosis of my condition were “Post Traumatic,” and therefore I promised that as soon as I got over my trauma, I would return to him for therapy. What dumbass psychoanalysts like him fail to grasp is that an immigrant exists in perpetual trauma; every day in exile is one kind, your assistant’s slow drawn out sentences she uses to address us when booking our sessions is another one, sitting opposite you explaining myself in a foreign language is the ultimate personification of trauma. And the insistence of Western psychoanalysis to implement the PTSD protocol is biggest proof of its fecundity, arrogance and presumptuousness to view their country as a paradise and the immigrant as a victim who needs to be healed, cultured, tamed, before he is worthy to join the ranks of other citizens who enjoy the benefits of that paradise.

But let’s assume, on the odd chance this therapeutic method works and you do heal internally, enough for you to reach a point where you are able to convince yourself that you do belong in this new society, no different from everyone else. Who, pray tell, will bury the rotting corpse of the past lodged inside your ribcage?

“Taming of the Immigrant” originally appeared in Arabic in Aljumhuriya and was translated for TMR by Rana Asfour.

In his work Tawq al-Hamam (the Dove’s Collar), the Andalusian writer Ibn Hazm tells the tale of a man he describes as wise, reasonable and sensible—until the day he travelled to Baghdad and stayed in one of its inns. ‘There, he saw the innkeeper’s daughter, fell in love with her, and married her. When they were alone together, she saw him undressed, and being a virgin, was alarmed by the size of his penis. She fled to her mother and would not see him. Those around her advised her to go to him, but she refused, and came close to death, and so he left her. Regretting his decision, he attempted to win her back but could not, even with the help of al-Abhari and others, for none could find any solution to his predicament. His mind became disordered and he went to stay in the maristan [Mental hospital], where he suffered for a long time until he had almost recuperated and found consolation, and yet still whenever he recalled her, he would sigh deeply.’

A few years ago my mind also became disordered, like that of the wise man, but since these days we don’t go straight to hospital for that sort of thing, I decided, for the first time in my life, to visit a psychiatrist. I complained to him for a whole hour: I frequently burst into floods of tears, I slept for hours and couldn’t get out of bed, I was suffering liver problems that the doctors seemed unable to find a reason for, my hair and beard were thinning, I’d resigned from my job several months previously, I saw no reason to live and was overwhelmed by despair, I consumed a vast quantity and variety of drugs which brought me neither pleasure or relief.

He listened, then pronounced that my complaints were the side effects of my recent breakup; the psychosomatic symptoms, too, were simply the pains that accompanied the end of an intimate relationship. In another context I’d have been angry, refusing to see my emotional experience—my epic of shattered love—compared with or ranked alongside the love affairs of others. We all believe that our romantic journeys are unique. But I was drained and in pain, and willing to accept any diagnosis of what was happening to me. I was ready to try whatever the doctor prescribed, without hesitation or objection.

The doctor gave me a strip of antidepressants. They relieved the pain and brought some equilibrium to my disturbed body, but it took time to find ‘consolation,’ as Ibn Hazm called the convalescence of the wise man in his story.

Although I fell in love like the wise man, my beloved left me not because of the size of my penis, but because of its fondness for adventure, along with other reasons too numerous to mention. When I was in the darkest depths of pain after our separation, friends pressured me to get over it as fast as possible, so I decided to get away, and left the city to escape their nagging. On my journey, while I wallowed in my pain and sabotaged any potential chances for future relationships, I discovered a whole breakup industry—an economy of strategies for getting over love.

Ibn Hazm devotes a chapter entitled ‘al-Dana’—a word which describes a sort of gruelling and all-consuming grief—to the pain of love lost and the trials of breakups. It is followed by a chapter entitled ‘al-Suluww,’ (‘consolation’), in which he writes: ‘Consolation after a long separation is like the disappointment which enters the soul when it achieves what it has long sought; the intensity of its striving abates and its desire fades away.’ Then, through the story of his experience with a courtesan with whom he fell in love as an adolescent, and who accompanied his family on their peregrinations to and from Cordoba before finally leaving him, Ibn Hazm arrives at the first cure for the trials of love and separation, the ‘consolation’ of the chapter’s title: a healing process which he divides into the stages of forgetting, indifference, and replacement.

But Ibn Hazm seems to contradict himself, often repeating that any love from which one can be ‘consoled’, and any relationship that can be forgotten, is not to be counted on.

For Ibn Hazm, it is not true love.

Notice that unlike in today’s psychoanalytical and romantic writings, in Ibn Hazm’s time passion and love represented a link to the metaphysical world. Every soul was split in two, and each half sent to this life to search for the half which would complete it; it was the meeting of a half with its lost counterpart which represented true love, as opposed to the kind of passion which cannot be counted on.

Ibn Hazm wrote his Dove’s Collar to help lovers distinguish true love from ephemeral lust, and to guide them past critics and naysayers along its thorny path. All this, of course, sounds very different to today’s discourse, in which the ideal of virtuous love has been replaced by notions of healthy and toxic relationships, balance between the two parties, the importance of equality, respect, and non-exploitation, and other concepts which have filtered through from the realm of political correctness to replace terms for love such as gharam and hawa.

The wise man in Ibn Hazm’s story ended up in the maristan because he was suffering and in pain. At the time, the function of the maristan—an infirmary for the mentally ill—was to relieve pain and suffering, rather than to subdue the patient and ready them for a return to the treadmill of production. There, Ibn Hazm’s wise man did not forget his beloved but sighed whenever her name was mentioned. He learned with time to silence his longing, to control his reactions and to maintain his equanimity. Forgetting one’s beloved was only for false and contemptible lovers.

Today’s breakup advice tends to place forgetting at the centre of its recovery plan. On self-help websites, the foremost piece of advice to heartbroken lovers is usually to forget: stay away from your ex, keep communication to a minimum, get rid of anything that reminds you of them. After that, the advice gets confusing: don’t sit in your room moping, go out and meet new people, life is full of pleasures and adventures—but don’t rush into new relationships, because you might get hurt. Put your sadness aside and get out of yourself. Cry and express your emotions, they say—but if your sadness lasts too long, they accuse you of weakness, of giving in to pain, of wallowing, or worst of all, of a pathetic attempt to win back the attention of the person who used to care about you.

It’s no wonder the advice is contradictory. There is no clear route map for avoiding or overcoming pain, or for the confusing task of getting over both the pain of a breakup and the memory of love.

One friend of mine who went through a painful divorce decided to go to a psychoanalyst rather than a psychiatrist. Instead of being prescribed medication like me, my friend has spent hours with her therapist, and is still doing so a year and a half down the line. Looking like she’s got it together and is proud of it, she spends more than ten hours a day at work, sometimes works six days instead of five, cares for her dog, and steers clear of any potential relationships on the grounds she isn’t ready yet, according to her therapist. She wants to maintain the stability she has now because, in her words, “I need a bit of time to work on myself.”

Analysing her last relationship, my friend found that she had always been attracted to men who would lie to her and exploit her emotionally. My response to that was to ask: “Are there men who don’t?” She shook her head. “You don’t understand. The problem isn’t them, it’s me—for being attracted to men like that.”

She pays around 100 US dollars for each session with her psychoanalyst, but she no longer has suicidal thoughts now, or borrows our phones to stalk her ex on Facebook, and she’s convinced that she’s forgotten her last relationship—she just needs to focus on her own issues.

Unlike her, I’ve never tried to forget. I remember the mistakes and happy moments of every passing fling. What would be left if we forgot our emotional connections, the most profound and affecting of the experiences which make us who we are? And anyway, you never really forget. You just put the relationship and all of its associations in a black box, and since there’s nowhere to put the box, you end up carrying it on your back forever, thinking no-one’s noticed. Every time you try to open a door to let love in, the black box eyes you from the corner of the room, shattering your focus and distracting you from the person beside you, who’s waiting eagerly for the moans of the climax which will offer proof that the two of you have truly connected.

Every ‘getting over it’ rests on an illusion of forgetting, on a flight into the future, yet no matter how hard you strain to break away, the memory will cling to you, or lurk in the corner of the room along with the broken pieces of your heart and soul. Maybe the solution is not to forget but to leave the wounds open, to wear them with pride and share them with others—whether you want to entice them to bed, or just to the cinema. Don’t hide your experiences from your new partner, because no matter how hard you try to forget, the monster will still be there, in the box, waiting for the right moment. Perhaps your new partner can help you tame the monster instead, help you transform your anger at yourself and your ex into the energy you need in order to change and build a new life and a new relationship. One day, the monster could be your pet.

She was telling me, in detail, about the time she was eight years old and electricity entered the village for the first time: the silver poles rising along the streets, the wires that company workers and engineers strung through the air and buried into the ground. And with it, her family got their first TV set.

"What were you watching?" I asked her.

She described a weekend night: the whole family, neighbors, and friends crowding into the living room to watch Sohair Zaki dance.

Even I, at eight years old, growing up in an Egypt ruled by Mubarak and shadowed by Islamists, found something about it strange.

“Even your father?” I asked.

Her father was, among other things, a Quran reciter.

She said yes.

This was very different from the world I grew up in. When a kissing scene, or sometimes a belly-dancing sketch, came on TV, parents would usually change the channel. Kids weren’t allowed to watch these things. But my mother was telling me about a different world, where a whole family openly enjoyed watching belly dancers.

“But Sohair was different, no one like her anymore,” my mom would add.

Sohair danced every weekend. It had become a kind of ritual, a weekly appointment the entire country kept.

I didn’t know what Sohair Zaki looked like. She had retired in the early 1990s. But my mother stayed alert, and whenever Sohair appeared in a film scene, she would touch my arm and say, “That’s Sohair.”

In high school, my reading started to go beyond kids’ and young adult stuff. I was obsessed with war history, then political history, which I believe is typical for most males. I read many biographies, mostly by politicians and diplomats, memoirs of politicians and generals. There’s something thrilling in that, especially the old ones, written by the politicians themselves. Now you find a book with Hillary Clinton’s name on it written like a New York Times op-ed, the same style and language as Michelle Obama’s book.

I can’t remember exactly which book it was, but somewhere in those pages I learned that during the 1960s, Sohair Zaki played a role that extended far beyond the stage.

She was part of an Egyptian delegation that traveled to the Soviet Union. What she helped bring back was a missile-defense agreement: the deal that enabled Egypt to build its missile shield and finally challenge Israel’s unchecked air superiority over Egyptian skies. That shift in the balance of power helped set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the liberation of Sinai and Egypt’s victory in 1973.

A dancer had helped alter the trajectory of a war.

Sohair was also from my city, Mansoura, which has given Egypt some of its most enduring artists, from Umm Kulthum to, well, me.

She was born there in the 1940s and came to dance the way most beautiful things emerge in provincial cities: by accident first, then by obsession. She began performing locally, but what truly set her apart, what caused the scandal that became a revolution, was her choice of music.

Dancers of her era performed to folk melodies and cabaret songs, the expected soundtrack of belly dance. Sohair decided to dance to Umm Kulthum.

By the standards of the time, it was almost sacrilegious. Umm Kulthum’s voice was sacred, elevated, literary, the sound of longing and civilization itself. To move the body to it was considered a desecration.

The controversy traveled upward until it reportedly reached Gamal Abdel Nasser himself, who is said to have asked with a smile: “Where is this lovely girl who dances to Umm Kulthum?”

She danced at the presidential residence.

And in doing so, she invented a new form.

What Sohair created was a style of Oriental dance (Raqs Sharqi) that shed some of its association with seduction and spectacle and became something closer to interpretation, a physical reading of the poem inside the song. Where traditional Oriental dance followed rhythm, Sohair followed emotion. Her movements elongated, became more lyrical, more architectural. She did not ornament the music; she inhabited it.

Her dancing carried the quality of translation, as if the body were rendering into gesture what the voice had rendered into sound. She elevated the form by insisting it could carry the same emotional and artistic weight as the music it moved to.

After the 1973 war, Egypt shifted decisively toward the United States. Richard Nixon visited Egypt with his wife and was reportedly mesmerized by Sohair’s dancing. But Sohair somehow did not belong to the coming American era.

Najwa Fouad became the figure who captured the attention of Henry Kissinger during his endless shuttle trips between Cairo and Israel. Meanwhile, Sohair continued dancing and pursued an acting career in a handful of films before retiring quietly at the end of the 1980s.

Sohair Zaki died last month.

The news reached me here in Las Vegas, a city that never goes dark, where the lights are so relentless they seem to have forgotten what they are celebrating. I found out the way people find things out now: through a screen. Then I spent the night moving through old videos and interviews, watching her pass through decades of black-and-white footage into color, always somehow existing outside of time.

There is one interview where she laughs, and I thought: my mother laughed like that once, telling me about her.

I kept watching. The algorithm fed me more: old performances, state television recordings, grainy reels from rooms full of people who are mostly gone now. At some point the screen blurred, and I closed my eyes.

And I saw the dark.

Not the Las Vegas dark, which is not really dark at all. The other dark, the first dark. The dark before electricity, before the silver poles rose from the streets, before wires crossed the sky. The dark of a gas lamp on a table, a plate of green grapes, a mother’s voice.

The dark that was not absence but presence, the whole world compressed into a small room, into a story told by someone who loved you, into the sound of a name: Sohair.

She danced to Umm Kulthum because she believed the body could hold that much feeling.

She was right.

I think now about the fire too, the fire of war, the missiles her journey helped bring, the sky over Sinai that Egypt finally reclaimed. All of it connected by the strange thread of a woman from Mansoura who refused to dance small.

The electricity came. The light came. The war came and went, leaving behind its scars and its bizarre glories.

And somewhere inside all of it, a little girl in a village watched the first television flicker alive in a crowded living room, and on the screen a woman was dancing.

Close your eyes.

Before the light, there was that dark.

And in that dark, something was already moving, already graceful, already free.

Prison literature presents itself as offering up a truth which the ordinary reader could never otherwise obtain. The prison writer demands humility and deference of their reader. I have been through hell, declares the writer, I have no reason to lie. I simply record. I write out of loyalty to my cellmates and everything we went through together. And since the prison experience is so noble, so venerated, the writer doesn’t see why they should be bound by considerations of craft or aesthetics. Some even argue that to aestheticize prison in one’s writing is a dereliction of the duty to reveal the truth, and that the beauty of the text lies in its honesty and authenticity. There’s a saying in Arabic, al-sidq mangah: the truth is a refuge. Or, as one of my cellmates pronounced it, in colloquial fashion: al-sidq manga. Truth’s a mango.

Egypt’s experiments in prison literature are full of contradictions. In the 1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s prisons were home to both Islamists and communists, and the two movements record their experiences so differently you start to wonder how truthful they are; it sometimes feels like they’re deliberately attempting to frustrate any understanding of what prison was like at the time. But their dissimilarity is a reflection of how individual they are, not how truthful they are. There can be no universally acknowledged truth when every prisoner goes through a different experience and feels a very personal pain.

Truth demands consensus and proof. But prison writings rely on personal narrative alone. Any untruth or inconsistency can be explained away as the work of prison itself, and when the story doesn’t make sense or its plausibility is called into question, the writer-narrator still has honesty on their side. Contradiction and error can’t be helped when prison puts people under such extreme pressure.

Then there’s the dead weight of ideology that drags on these writings. Prison literature has always been part of political conflict in the same way prison itself, in the mind of the political prisoner, is an unavoidable part of the political struggle. Most Arabic prison literature I’ve read has been produced by political prisoners for whom writing is just an extension of their activism. It stops them going crazy, or keeps their soul from going dead, while they wait for the better future they’re going to build with their party or organization when they get out. Or if they’re writing after the fact, then they do so to inscribe the experiences of their movement on the walls of history, to make a scratch—however small—on the towering façade of power and the narrative it imposes. So the artistry of whatever’s written about isn’t what matters to the imprisoned activist writer; the important thing is the documentary content of the text, and what it can do to serve the literary-political cause.

But documents and testimonies aren’t literature and are certainly not art. And if art has documentary value, it is only secondary. A document attempts to explain, to educate the public. Literature exists unto itself; its essence lies in its singularity, not its expository abilities. And it’s from works of literature that writers learn their craft. In a work of literature, form is central, indeed form and content are one—that’s what makes the work. In documents and testimonies of imprisonment, content dominates, and form is just a means to an end.

A political prisoner is never on their own in prison, even if they were arrested and interrogated alone. In the writings of political prisoners, there’s always the moment when the writer meets their comrades on the inside. There’s always a clear distinction drawn between political and criminal imprisonment, too. Political writers like to make it clear they’re different from the criminal prisoners, even when they share a cell.

Prison, for these writers, is a crucible in which the political collective is forged, its members’ commitments put to the test, and the bonds between them strengthened. Only the symbolism varies: with the Islamists, tears flow as they bow and kneel together for the dawn prayer; with the communists, members quiver and burst into flaming orgasm when their comrades’ voices join together in a Sheikh Imam song.

In the end, the prison writings I’ve read aren’t really about prison. They’re extended analyses of the political moment in which they were written, with prison just another arena in which political conflict plays out. It’s an arena that sees the writer defeated yet defiant, but nobody prepared me for that moment, and nobody told me what the experience would be like. I always expected I’d end up in prison, like anyone involved in public life in Egypt, but I never imagined it would be art, literature, a novel, that would put me there. I’d ended up in prison as a writer, not a political activist.

With artificial attention, I have been following the quarrel between Team MENA and Team SWANA as it plays out across the humanities academy and the cultural institutions. Artificial attention is the only kind these debates deserve, and even so, it did not spare me from sadness.

Lately, that sadness has sharpened, like a white dove dying in a green field, ever since I noticed that organizations in Arab countries have started writing SWANA in Arabic — سوانا — a graceless transliteration that makes my earwax drip from the irritation.

Scholars are losing sleep over it. Conferences are convened, decolonized, and hungover by the closing session. Grant money is spent. A question hangs over the field like a blood moon at this time of the month: shall we call a large slice of the planet “MENA” or “SWANA”?

MENA — Middle East and North Africa — has been the standard shorthand for decades. It was coined by Western strategists who needed a clean label for the region their armies kept visiting, back when the Ottoman Empire was dying its long and painful death. The very word Middle is an act of positioning: middle of what, and east of whom? Middle and East from London, presumably. The map is drawn with the observer standing in Europe, looking out.

MENA started to be used in English by the end of th 19^th century, to replace another word that European used for century called this are which was the “Mohammedan”. The replacement happened after they discovered that no one uses this word to describe themselves, and that many of those they used to call “Mohammedan” have nothing to do with Islam.

SWANA — Southwest Asia and North Africa — presents itself as the cure for past ignorance. Here, it helps to know where the term actually comes from, because it was not minted in Cairo or Karachi. It was coined by diaspora activists who set out to “decolonize” geographic language: it gained traction from the 1990s onward, was popularized through North American university spaces in the 2010s, and finally went viral on social media in the years since. In other words, the decolonial alternative to the colonial map was drawn, once again, in the West — only this time in the seminar room and the campus identity center rather than the war ministry.

I have my own Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy theory about why the term is surfacing now, and with such force. The rise of SWANA, I suspect, tracks the rise of China as the leading candidate for the next global hegemony. A new gravity center re-mappeing the world around itself rather than around London. If MENA drew the region as seen from Europe, SWANA quietly refiles it under Asia.

And what, exactly, holds the SWANA block together? Morocco and Pakistan share a border with no one. Sudan and Kyrgyzstan share no language, no history, no cuisine. Libya and Indonesia have met, perhaps, at an international summit or two. The only thing — the only thing — that lends this collection of peoples and states any coherence is Islam: its civilizational history, its economic ethics, its conception of the political community as the Umma, a body that claims to supersede the nation-state. Islam is not merely the majority religion of these countries. It is the architectural logic that built their cities, organized their markets, and shaped what sits on their plates.

Neither MENA nor SWANA is a neutral description. Both are camouflage, stretched over a single unspoken word: Islam.

MENA was useful to the Western imperial old order. SWANA is useful to a new order in which China and India are the rising powers — both of which happen to be running active projects to suppress their Muslim minorities, and wipe any trace of Islamic heritage within their past history, both have used violence and military force to do it. The Uyghurs and Kashmir are the template. Seen this way, the move from MENA to SWANA does not decolonize the map at all. It redraws it to make room for new colonizers, who prefer their Muslims legible, manageable, and above all — unnamed.

This region, now filed under “MENA” or “SWANA,” was for centuries the core of a vast empire. It was not defeated by the Europeans until the Europeans first freed themselves — from the grip of the Church and the king — and rebuilt their societies on a new model: the social contract, the separation of powers, the law of heaven traded for the recklessness of liberalism. The question of authenticity and modernity is born precisely from the political, economic, and above all military decline of the SWANA states. Confronted with defeat and colonization, one camp answers that the only way forward is to adopt the Western model wholesale and dissolve into its market. Another camp answers that one can join the economy while keeping the authoritarian inheritance handed down from the Islamic empire, modern markets, ancient despotism.

And then there is the reactionary camp, which uses Islam as a label for a politics that has nothing to do with Islam: a cover for authoritarianism, for tribalism, for the systematic exclusion of women and minorities.

So the spectator behind MENA and SWANA — and I am one of them — is left watching two flamingos argue over the body of a region, while both agree, in perfect silence, on the one thing neither will say aloud. The dove goes on dying in its green field. The conferences adjourn. And the word that organized the markets and built the cities waits, still unnamed, for the next empire to decide what to call the people who live on top of it.

..

1.

Las Vegas was brimming with mosques. As soon as I’d typed “mosque near me” into the Google Maps search, myriad red dots displayed themselves all at once on my screen.

The Al-Hamada mosque, one of the first Las Vegas mosques founded in the Seventies, and winner of a five-star rating, boasted a review claiming that its writer had “felt at peace” as soon as he’d crossed over the threshold. Another described how its congregation had helped “during the family’s short stay in Las Vegas” and that “God is Great.” A perusal of the mosque’s online images seemed to indicate that the building itself occupied a tight space, with no dome or minaret. Most of its visitors appeared to be dark-skinned, which meant the congregation were most likely followers of the Nation of Islam.

I scratched it off my list.

I had no plans to attend an American Salafi mosque. I hadn’t left the shortened robes, the miswak, the scent of musk and the bushy beards in Egypt, only to come here for much of the same. At times, I’d come across them in West Las Vegas as they approached cars stopped at the traffic light, hawking their literature for $10 my brother. One of them honed in on me while I was in my car. Cornered, I lied that I had no cash. No problem, brother, he replied, undeterred as he presented me with a card reader attached to his mobile phone. After I’d paid, I browsed the magazine and found that it mostly contained news of the leaders of the brotherhood.

I quickly moved on to click the link to the second mosque on the list. There, on their website (in the third line to be exact), was a message explicitly indicating that they were open to all races, nationalities, and sects. The recurrent usage of words like “race” and “color” seemed to imply that they did not belong to the Nation of Islam. It appeared that they belonged to the Las Vegas Islamic Center, which was founded in the Eighties.

A further online search came up with the Al Omariya, a mosque as well as an Islamic school. The images portrayed girls as young as ten in their hijab. This website was loaded with proselytization on sound education, proper morals, and the preservation of the nascent Muslim youth. Off the list it came. All I had wanted was to visit a mosque, not send my children to an Islamic brainwashing laundromat. Yet another mosque’s website displayed a picture with a caption titled Bless you, Oh Hussain! declaring its Shiite affiliation. Al-Hikma, on the other hand, had received comments regarding the quality of the food.

Just then, as the waitress came round to clear my now empty beer bottle and to ask if I wanted a second one, Jose Al—– appeared. I stood up to shake his hand and he hugged me and took a seat across from me. He asked me the usual questions about work and family and I answered, albeit distracted, and then proceeded to mechanically ask him much of the same. Once I had a new frothy beer at the table in front of me, I duly announced my plans to visit a mosque.

— Don’t you have a mosque you go to already? he asked.

— No, I replied.

With seven years between us, Jose was still in his twenties. Sleepy-eyed and huge, his large, impressive, and tightly wound muscular bulk was covered in tattoos. He was a bartender at the same hotel where I worked as a purchasing director, in charge of quality control and food storage. But that was before we were both laid off. We met by chance at a work gathering that brought together employees from the various departments to listen to the “motivational” spiel of their managers. In that first encounter, he brought up poetry, and I let on that I not only read it but wrote some myself. Immediately, he extended his hand for me to shake and introduced himself as a poet. And so, we became friends. But we didn’t really talk much about poetry, as his interest and expertise centered mainly on American poetry and a little Mexican, while I read exclusively in Arabic. I confess that I hadn’t read a single poem in English before I’d met him. As one who claimed to write for immigrants like himself, his English poetry was duly peppered with Spanish. Southern poetry. It’s all about fiery, passionate words my friend. Do you get what I’m saying? he’d ask.

When Covid-19 struck, Jose was among the first batch to be laid off. For a while, he scraped by on unemployment benefits and food delivery gigs in his old Kia, until he managed to find work at a large warehouse that imported cheap goods and auto parts from China that were resold in the U.S.

I fail to recall now how Jose met Phil, whom he brought to our second meeting. Since then, he’s become the third in our triumvirate that communes weekly for beer drinking. I remember, back then, how he’d plunked his solemn, imposing self down, asked for his beer and once it had arrived, remained silent the entire time, listening as I explained to Jose the difference between Friday prayers and Sunday church service.

I confessed to Jose that I hadn’t once been to Friday prayers since I’d arrived in the United States. At that, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a black hair tie, gathered his hair between his fingers, and launched into an extensive monologue about the importance of going to the mosque and to Friday service. Even if I wasn’t particularly religious, it was the best way for me to get to know my community, especially since an immigrant could, at any given day, find himself in need of help or support. Generally speaking, he extrapolated, religious people, regardless of their faith, were always eager to help, believing this would bring them closer to God.

I conceded that I hadn’t considered any of this. All I’d been searching for was a clean mosque that I could attend for the afternoon prayers where the ceiling fan dials would be turned to the fastest speed. Preferably, an empty mosque with very few — one or maybe even two — worshipers, reading the Qur’an in a barely audible voice. I wanted to reclaim the time when, as a child, I’d visit the mosque to lay down on its carpeted floor, close my eyes, and let all my worries and troubles spirit themselves away.

Phil piped in that he understood me completely, and that although he himself was an atheist, he could still understand how places of worship could be repositories of energy, able to evoke and withhold soothing communal memories for their congregants. It was a cave in the Valley of Fire State Park that did it for Phil — a place where early inhabitants of the valley had worshiped and prayed. On every visit, without fail, he felt the energy coursing through the place, despite the centuries that had passed.

Phil was five years older than me. I’ve never understood exactly what he does. All I knew was that he was born in Las Vegas, had a big family, and owned a house and a car. Phil, who worked in the deserts of Vegas and Arizona, looked upon his work — shooting documentaries for PBS — as something closer to a hobby in which he went on long expeditions exploring nature, delving into the history of the deserts’ inhabitants, and unearthing extinct civilizations. His theory was that life in the Vegas Valley went through expansive cycles every four or five centuries, during which the valley would flourish, attracting people to settle down and build. Two to four centuries later, depending on the extent of that civilization’s depletion of nature, another drought would strike the valley, forcing its residents to abandon their parched lands, leaving the dust from the heels of their forced exodus to wipe away the urbanization they left behind.

— I don’t get where the problem is, said Phil, interrupting my thoughts. Aren’t there any mosques in Vegas?

I unlocked my phone and showed him my screen displaying the last mosque I’d been researching on my browser.

— On the contrary, I said. I’m spoilt for choice at the number of mosques here. But, I’m at a loss over which one to choose.

2.

I hadn’t yet made up my mind regarding the mosque situation. That is, until I picked up a woman and her two children. She asked me if I was from Turkey because of my name, and when I said I wasn’t, she asked me if I was Muslim. After a quick glance at the children, and a few more seconds of hesitation, I replied.

— Sometimes.

She smiled.

— Why not always? she asked.

I smiled back at her through the rearview mirror before I turned my eyes to the road without saying anything more. As we drove to their destination we passed the Al-Isra Mosque, and my three passengers disembarked two blocks later. I switched off my GPS, turned around, and drove back to the mosque with half an hour to spare before the noon prayers.

Al-Isra Mosque is adorned with a minaret and a dome painted in bright yellow. It was plain to see that its architects had ambitiously hoped to replicate Jerusalem’s venerable Dome of the Rock, only to fall well below their aspirations. The entrance to the mosque was crowded with signs written in English, Arabic, and Urdu, as well as a donation poster for an organization caring for Muslim orphans in East Asia, and another for digging wells in Africa. Below these were stacked FBI-produced leaflets with their messages bold and clear, printed with the customary grammatical and linguistic typos; If you see something, report something or I live in this society, inform and protect our society.

I refuse to believe that the American government and its agencies are devoid in their entirety of people who can speak and write proper Arabic. I believe, rather, that it is a special form of communication that arrogantly displays its mistakes as a sign of their utter disregard for any need to camouflage themselves among “authentic” Arabs, seeing them as part of an insurgent plan to establish autonomy and identity withinز A form of westernized Arabic, if you will, perfected by the supposedly omniscient FBI, which resists the need to comprehend Arabic, and the Arabs alike.

I became aware of a man in a fluorescent yellow jacket, standing just outside the mosque, devouring a green apple with his gaze entirely fixated on my every move. I took off my shoes, placed them on the allotted shelf, and entered the mosque. The prayer hall was spacious with green thick-carpeted floors and a high ceiling. The names of God were inscribed in gold on green ribbon that ran along the walls of the hall.

Soon, worshippers began to trickle in and I was relieved to note, mainly from how they were dressed, that they were of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. As it was still midday prayers, many had come in their work clothes. I noted a few construction workers, nurses, one HVAC worker, and a Pakistani dressed in a shalwar kameez.

As soon as I entered the bathroom, I was assaulted by the familiar smell of sodium hypochlorite, the requisite odor of all mosque bathrooms it seems, regardless of their location. I was delighted to note that they had bidets in there too. I urinated, and completed my ablutions before catching up with the prayers. Finishing two Sunnah Rak’ahs I remained in place while the majority of the worshipers started to retreat back to where they had come from. I closed my eyes, trying to evoke the expectant grace that washes over one in moments of serenity. But, none of that shit happened. All that ran through my mind was how, as an Uber driver, I had wasted so much time that could have been better used to lock in two or three more rides.

Immediately after I’d stepped out of the mosque gates, the man in the yellow jacket came up to me. He had a wide mouth, green eyes, dripping wet shoulder-length hair, and nails that were long but clean. He addressed me in a language foreign to my ears.

I must have looked askance because he switched to English to let me know that Asr prayers were for the weary, even though he didn’t pray himself. I thanked him, after which he advised that should I ever be in need of anything, I am to consult with Dr. Burhan, the man who had built the mosque as well as the adjacent Islamic Center. A good man, he called him, who helped the likes of him, even though he was a non-Muslim because, he added for good measure, God loves us all.

— Who are you? I interrupted before he could go on.

He straightened himself up to his full height, spread the palm of one hand on his chest, while pointing with the other to a camera hanging above the mosque’s gate.

— Security.

He then launched into a full-on monologue that began with praising the neighbors and the neighborhood. How “bad” guys were everywhere; the drunk and the angry who created trouble. How although the mosque sometimes received bomb threats or other violent threats, the police were there to protect them by sending two cars for Friday prayers and during Eid holiday prayers.

He was now well into his speech, moving his hands in every which direction assuring me that he’d always be there to make sure everyone was safe. As he went on, I took in my surroundings, and saw, at the opposite side of the street, behind a low wall, a row of run-down homes. It was only after I finally thanked the man, and walked away, that I remembered that I had forgotten to ask his name.

On the way to the car, I noticed that behind the mosque was a junkyard, filled mostly with broken yachts and boats of various sizes; they all looked sad and dead. Another “only in Vegas” site: a yacht graveyard in the middle of the desert. They were most likely brought in at one point by owners to sail on Lake Mead. Now instead they lay on their sides like giant boulders that even God had forgotten about. In fact, the lake’s water level had begun to decrease, heralding a new wave of climate change scaremongers, who felt that the disgruntled climate would wipe out Las Vegas within the next fifty years. But at that moment, all I could see on the horizon was the clear blue Vegas skies and the mountains that surrounded our valley.

3.

I returned home after midnight to find the bedroom door locked, which meant that my wife and the two boys had finally gone to sleep. The mess of toys and other debris was scattered everywhere and plates were piled high in the kitchen sink. I checked the mouse traps distributed in the house. All clear, no mice — today.

We moved into this house a month ago, the third since our relocation to America. At first, we rejoiced at the extra space, as we both held on to high hopes that we were headed towards a new chapter, one in which we could reclaim our love and zest for life. Now we are Henderson residents, part of the upper-middle class echelon of Las Vegas.

My wife and I first met seven years ago in Dubai. She was working in an advertising and marketing firm ,and I was managing a grand hotel. Over there, we lived our years immersed in fleeting pleasures, working hard and spending all what we’d earned on leisure and travel. We eventually got married, giving the idea of children not the slightest thought. But everything changed the day she came to me with a hesitant smile and a positive pregnancy test. I was so happy. We hugged and danced. That evening, she told me that we should plan to have the child in America so that it would have a shot at a real passport, just like her nephew. We both knew that up until then we’d been living a life of false stability, for without the guarantee of a path to citizenship, we’d have no choice but to return to Egypt.

A former colleague of mine worked at one of the big hotels in Vegas, and he suggested that we come check it out. Samira loved Vegas, and found the city similar to Dubai — déjà vu at every corner. With the help of this colleague, I landed my first job with a substantially bigger salary than the one I’d been earning in Dubai, and with far better working conditions that did not include excessive censorship and the constant dread of deportation hanging over my head.

Instead of one child, we had twins. We entered an inferno that we have yet to come out of. The stress hit us hard. Samira and I turned from lovers to parents burdened with responsibilities, exploding in each other’s faces because we knew no one whom we could offload on in the city. We thought about going back to Dubai, but the pandemic decimated our exit plans. Airports and borders closed down. The hotel I worked in reduced my wages before I was eventually laid off in the second wave, and we had to move to a house that was hardly bigger than the tiniest room.

That year, our life became a living nightmare in which we struggled day after day to lift our heads off the pillow just to meet the needs of our two boys. My colleague, the only Arab I knew in town, had up and left for Florida, while we remained stuck in the city that the pandemic had forced into darkness, the howls of solitary slot machines pining for players echoing through its deserted streets as they bounced off the walls of abandoned luxury hotels.

I hear a sound coming from the kitchen, so I get up and look around, wondering if it’s a mouse or simply my imagination.

After the vaccination campaigns, the city began to recover, and I was able to secure an administrative job at a famous restaurant in addition to my work as an Uber driver as food delivery gigs. We moved to this larger house with a back garden and two rooms and I spotted a mouse making a run for it behind the kitchen fridge. I bought a bunch of mousetraps to distribute around the house after I made sure to smear a lick of peanut butter onto each one.

We caught the mouse the next day. But it was Jose who told me that one mouse in the house meant there were two, and that two meant a family of them and that we should expect them to appear one by one. There are times, during the night when we can hear them and on more than two occasions, I’ve found traces of their feces in the corners of the house.

I open the bedroom door, and in the glow of the pale light seeping in from the hallway, I see Samira’s body sandwiched in between the two boys. I lift each one to his bed then brush my teeth, undress and lie down in bed in my boxers and an old T-shirt. Samira turns around and, for the briefest moment, she opens her eyes and closes them again, pulls the covers tighter around herself and turns around, giving me her back.

We still love one another, but where has the desire gone? When will the exhaustion and endless worry end?

A few months ago, I passed a family of three near a public park. The father, mother, and child were living in their car. I didn’t tell Samira about what I saw but since then, all I see is our family sliding down that slope, eventually ending without a home. Such fears are no longer the stuff of nightmares, but a reality that thousands face each and every day. For a time, we too had perched on the brink of the tipping point.

Lately, I’ve been failing to recognize my own feelings. My heart has started to beat to the rhythms of stress and anxiety. I’ve realized that I no longer laugh. I try to watch my favorite comedies. I just can’t find the time. I bought a joint and smoked it with Samira. By the end we hugged and passed out on the sofa. In the past, one puff was all it took for us to drown in a sea of hysterical laughter.

I still love Samira, but love isn’t everything when even in its presence I turn my back to her. I shed the covers and sleep naked. After pregnancy and childbirth, Samira’s body has transformed into a new, alien one, that I don’t recognize. She, too, has become ashamed of it, refusing to let me get into the bath with her, and asking me to turn off the lights if, by chance, every two months we decide to strip naked and go for it.

Sleep refuses to come, and I think about jerking off out of despair and boredom, but I imagine, for a fleeting moment, that I hear something in our darkened room. I sit up straight and wonder, could there be a mouse in the room?

4.

I returned to the Isra mosque for another visit. This time I arrived just in time for the last Rak’ah of the Maghrib prayers. Again, after completing my prayer, I remained in place until most of the worshipers had departed. I stretched out my legs in front of me, and in the stillness, I closed my eyes and tried searching for what had gone missing inside me. I was pulled out of my meditation when a hand patted my shoulder. A man with white hair and brown skin, wearing brown cotton trousers and a summer shirt, asked if I was okay. He didn’t leave even when I confirmed that I was and instead sat down, extended his arm out to me, and introduced himself.

— Your brother, Dr. Burhan.

— Ahlan Wa Sahlan.

I shook his hand, and he asked again about my condition. He said that he hadn’t intended to interrupt my devotion, but had merely wanted to introduce himself, and to get to know me seeing it was the first time he’d seen me around.

I was cagey in my initial dealings with him, and opted to withhold giving too much away, including my name. Instead, I nodded as he was describing the lovely community they have here and told me I was welcome to reach out to him or anyone in the mosque’s administration if ever I was in need. For every problem God has created, there is a solution.

I thanked him for his love and assured him I would take him up on his offer, should the need arise. I left the prayer hall and stood at the mosque entrance, where the worshipers’ shoes were stacked. An advertisement for a center offering psychological and counseling services tailored to Muslims caught my eye. You’re certainly looking for a psychological expert who understands your cultural background and the nature of your local community… There was that word again, I thought. Community.

I photographed the ad and smiled as I imagined Samira’s reaction if I suggested that she book an appointment or that we do so together. Maybe our salvation lay there.

In complete contrast to me, Samira had nothing positive to associate with Islam. And I don’t blame her. She lived in Egypt with a father who insisted on interfering in her life — even after he divorced her mother on the pretext of religion — and what he considered halal or haram. She hadn’t been able to break free until she’d moved to Dubai.

The security guard was waiting for me when I stepped out of the mosque gates. I greeted him from afar and headed to my car, but he ran towards me and asked if I had spoken with Dr. Burhan.

— Yes. Thank you, I replied.

He explained that he’d told Dr. Burhan about me. In amazement I enquired what he’d had to say, seeing he knew nothing about me. He’d worried that I might’ve been a Islamist fundamentalist.

— An extremist? Is that what you’re accusing me of?

— Yes, he said. I watched you examining the mosque from the inside and out and staying long after the worshipers had left. Don’t blame me but the country’s in peril with whites killing Blacks and the Latinos collecting and storing weapons. America is going to hell and a civil war is brewing! Would you believe it if I told you that just last year a group of Iraqis — Shiites — came looking for trouble because Dr. Burhan agreed to host a betrothal ceremony between a young Sunni man and a Shiite woman from their community? Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not even Muslim. I’m a Christian Turk. I haven’t been to Turkey in years, nor to church for that matter. Dr. Burhan offered me this job and the community is helping me out…

There was that word again, I thought. Community.

5.

Then Phil asked me if I’d found what I was looking for in the mosques of Las Vegas. I told him that what I was looking for was most likely not found at the mosque, and that nonetheless I’d been to the Isra mosque. I offered up the address when he asked me and he explained that this neighborhood had previously been an industrial site crammed with workshops and factories. I described the boat cemetery behind the mosque, and he confirmed my hunch and told me that although it may seem strange now, there was a time when a thriving Las Vegas was famous for manufacturing boats and yachts, and that Lake Mead had not only been a booming nautical tourism destination, but a sought-after place for business meetings, remotely tucked away, far from the prying surveillance of security services.

— What language are the prayers and the Imam’s preachings conducted in? he reiterated.

— I’ve not been to Friday prayer there, but I do know that the sermon’s in English while the prayers are in Arabic.

With his usual hesitancy, Phil asked timidly, if he could one day accompany me to Friday service.

— Why?

—I’ve never been inside a mosque before.

I made a quick mental rundown of all the topics that could come up in a Friday sermon. In Egypt, for example, part of every Friday sermon is dedicated to prayers damning the infidels — those who have strayed from the faith.

A quick sweep of the Al-Isra website on my cell phone revealed that the upcoming Friday prayer would be followed by a celebration to commemorate the Isra and Miraj, with free sweets for the children. I figured the sermon would surely be dedicated to retelling the story of the night Prophet Muhammed journeyed from Mecca to Jerusalem and then to heaven. An entertaining story full of adventures with, Alhamdulillah, no place for hate speech or contempt for other groups.

— Next Friday should be fine, I informed Phil.

That Friday afternoon was promising to be another scorcher of a Las Vegas day when I drove to pick up Phil. He was dressed appropriately, in blue jeans and a white and blue checkered shirt. On the way there, he questioned me about the meaning behind the name of the mosque.

— It means “night journey”

I proceeded with a brief explanation, peppered with my own scientific twist to the tale, about how the name dates back to a legendary journey undertaken by the Prophet Muhammad called al-Isra wal Miraj. The Prophet’s tribe, or what we would now refer to as “community,” I pointedly explained to Phil, in a show of power besieged him for daring to step outside their traditions and the norms of the commune. Things became tough after his first wife and uncle-cum-guardian passed away in the same year. He was sad, frustrated, and probably depressed. To cheer him up God sent Buraq, a heavenly creature with wings, smaller than a horse but larger than a donkey, who flew Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he met and prayed with all the prophets who had come before him. Then, the angel Gabriel — with whom Phil indicated he was familiar — took him to the farthest reaches of the seventh heaven, to Sidra Al-Muntaha or the lote tree, where he received his instructions from God to pray five times a day. In a flash, he was back in his bed in Mecca, before the mattress had gone even slightly cold.

— Whoa. What a story. Was the Buraq an animal or an angel —

— A mythical animal. But Muslims believe in its existence. I explained to Phil that, for Muslims, this was in no way a fictional tale. Each Muslim was obligated to believe that this journey was an actual miracle bestowed on the Prophet in which time and place succumbed to God’s command and will, making the journey possible. Very much like that movie Interstellar, you know?

I parked in the mosque’s parking lot, and no sooner had we started walking towards the building than the security guard ran towards us, with a disconcerting smile and an enthusiasm that seemed slightly out of the ordinary.

— You’re late, he said. Everyone’s finished the prayer and gone to the show. Come here, follow me.

The mosque door was closed, so Phil and I followed the guard towards the yacht graveyard. He pointed to the corner at what appeared to be a large storage shed and said:

— Everyone is there. Hurry or you’ll miss the miracle.

Phil and I crossed the dusty, unpaved yard until we reached the half-open door. Inside we saw a stage, half a meter high, in front of which rows of chairs were occupied by women, men and children, some of whom were enjoying unicorn-shaped candy. Phil and I chose two chairs in the back row.

It was clear we’d arrived in the middle of the show because, above the stage a screen was already playing panoramic views of the Nevada desert. We had no clue what was going on when suddenly out of the right corner of the stage, a Black child emerged, wearing a long robe, leaning on a walking stick, and speaking through a headset. He spoke in English.

— Finally, the Night Journey ended, and the Prophet Muhammad, May God Bless Him and Grant Him Peace, returned, with a gift for all Muslims. The five daily prayers.

A small chorus of children and teenagers appeared behind him on the stage and broke out into a short song about the rituals of prayer. Phil looked at me in confusion, so I leaned in and whispered.

— I’m not really sure what’s going on either. This is certainly not Friday prayer, which I think we must’ve missed. This is a celebration marking the Isra and Miraj.

The choir wrapped up their performance and diligently withdrew from the stage, while the child in the robe remained. He opened his arms wide and addressed the audience.

— But, Brothers and Sisters, what happened to the Buraq after that trip?

— We certainly don’t know, Omar, that’s for sure.

It was Dr. Burhan, who had suddenly appeared on the left side of the stage and was making his way towards its center. There, he turned to face the audience.

— However, we are truly fortunate because, here in the blessed land of Nevada, where all signs indicate that the Buraq’s blessed hooves once trod, is proof that the message of our Prophet, the message of Islam, was able to reach every place on earth.

Dr. Burhan broke off into Arabic to quote a verse from the Qur’an — We sent Thee as good tidings — before continuing in English.

— The Buraq dynasty inhabited the valleys of Nevada and were known to the indigenous people of the land, who adopted their principled morals. But sadly, they were chased away, persecuted, and finally exterminated by the settlers. Today, in memory of this miraculous journey, we are proud to host the last of the surviving Buraqs.

A montage of images of caves in the Vegas mountains popped up on the screen. Some scenes portrayed hunting creatures with multiple arms and legs. At that moment, Dr. Burhan’s voice rose dramatically as he shouted,

— Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on …

The room went dark save for the flickering light emanating from the screen, which now displayed an image of an abstract drawing on a cave wall of what appeared to be a winged animal with four legs. Suddenly the screen came crashing down and as the lights gradually returned, there before us stood what appeared to be a beast that was longer than a donkey, wider than a horse, with a silver tail and mane. On its head lay a crown studded with red jewels. The thing was draped in a red cape adorned with golden stripes, its eyes as wide as a bull’s.

Complete silence reigned in the room, before, as if all at once, it shattered into a million voices calling out, Allahu Akbar and Glory Be to God.

The Buraq spread its silver wings, shook its head, and snorted. And then with a gentle flap of its wings, it lifted itself off the ground to hover over the stage.

The room erupted with further takbeers and ululations. The children were visibly stunned, the mothers and fathers moved to tears.

The Buraq continued its ascent upward until it reached the roof of the storehouse, its wings fully spread out, the silver feathers turning to gold. The Buraq glowed like a celestial planet lit up by the blessed tree from the heavens.

I turned to Phil and he was stunned, his mouth hanging open. When he could finally speak, he was breathless.

— Bro! What a show, I’ve never seen a unicorn in my life.

I admit, I was not only taken aback by what we had just witnessed, but felt something akin to a communal familiarity, despite the strangeness all around me. A pride I couldn’t restrain had crept into my tone as I answered Phil.

— Not a unicorn. See, no horn. It’s Buraq.

I reveled in the look of bewilderment on his face as he pretended to grasp what I was saying, all while Buraq flapped its radiant wings, as golden as if they’d been spun from the sun itself. A heady scent of musk and jasmine infused the room. I tried to make sense of what was happening in front of me, applying logic and reason to explain it all. But my mind refused to see it as anything but a miracle. A sign of future good tidings.

The Buraq folded in its wings and began its descent as the voice of Egyptian singer Hisham Abbas chanting the revered 99 names of God rose from the speakers. I smiled, but soon found that I was struggling to suppress bubbling laughter that was threatening to burst forth and disturb the revered peace that was now reigning over the room with the Buraq’s majestic descent.

It had all been going very well for me and I’d been willing to eat it all up, but Hisham Abbas’s song managed to topple down the dream, pulling the mask away from this farcical charade and exposing it for what it was — a joke.

Lodged in my memory is that same chant, usually played as an opening number at weddings or parties to let invitees know that the real party was about to begin with its sashaying, grinding revelers and belly dancers, flowing beer, rolled up joints and shishas dipped in hashish. In that context, the euphoric magnanimity of the moment was lost on me despite being surrounded by a theater packed with a captivated audience swaying to the hymns of Hisham Abbas. When the singer chanted “the Manifest, the Hidden, the Exalted” the audience raced towards the Buraq to be blessed.

Chaos ensued, and Dr. Burhan’s voice could be heard bellowing at the crowd to return to their seats. Leaving Phil behind, I took the opportunity to head outside, with my hand still over my mouth, hoping to suppress my laughter until I was at least out the door. Standing in the boat cemetery, I experienced a joy I hadn’t felt in years. I took out my cellphone to call Samira and to share with her what I’d just witnessed. Before I could do that, a Jesus-like figure with loose hair down to his shoulders and a long white robe approached me holding a set of what looked to be promotional cards in his hand.

— Did you enjoy the show?

— It was magnificent. Out of this world.

At that, he handed me one of the cards.

— I’m pleased to hear that. Our company specializes in religious and educational entertainment shows. We cover five religions and have package deals that you can view on our website, the Godshow dot com.

No sooner had I grabbed the card than I was seized by another fit of laughter. Undeterred, he continued, explaining that they were a local business with plans to build a theater in Blue Diamond, a small town about a twenty-minute drive from Vegas in the heart of the Red Rock Mountains. Although he agreed that the location might be remote for some, he also felt it worked best given the nature of the shows they offered.

— Besides, most ancient religions first appeared in the desert and the mountains. We have us here magnificent nature we can use to support religious tourism in Vegas, don’t you agree? he asked.

— Wonderful my man. Really wonderful, I nodded.

My laughing had escalated to include an embarrassing snort, for which I quickly tried to apologize.

— Please excuse me, but the show has me under some kind of spiritual spell, in which my whole body is brimming with joy and laughter. I haven’t laughed this much in so long. I can’t begin to explain how happy I am right now.

— That’s exactly the sort of thing we hope to bring to our audiences. I’ll have to go now to help my colleagues shut down and pack up the drones in the unicorn’s body. I hope to catch you at other shows.

He left. I stood there, alone in the boat cemetery, laughing and chortling, under the glare of the relentless Vegas sun.

In a new book that just came out, I contributed a chapter on science fiction in Arabic literature. In it, I attempt to introduce a new definition of sci-fi—one that diverges from the Western model. My approach isn’t rooted in postcolonial studies or the decolonization discourse (a term that, frankly, still makes me giggle every time I hear it). Instead, I base my thinking on a deeper examination of how different cultures understand time and the future.

Since Socrates, Western philosophy has imagined time as a line—always moving forward in a single direction. This shapes not just Western metaphysics but even grammar. In English, for example, every verb must exist in the past, present, or future. In Arabic, verbs exist in the past, present, or as imperative . There is no verb form for the future.

Time in Eastern philosophy—and in many ancient civilizations—is not a straight line. It’s a cycle, a loop, a presence.

So, the Western idea that science fiction must extrapolate from the present to imagine a future doesn’t necessarily align with other philosophical or even scientific frameworks. It assumes a specific, culturally constructed timeline.

If you’re curious to explore this further, you’ll find more in my chapter in this book: The Speculative Route: Futures from South and Southwest Asia and North

They are the trend now, the new Heines, who practice the cowardly audacity.

This class emerged in the last decades as a unique Arab product of the planetary crises, mainly caused by the greed of Arab petroleum states. They formulated what we might call now, the petrodollar Arab bourgeoisie. They are set in the unbearable position: unable to become full citizens in the Western countries where they reside, and unable — or unwilling — to return to homelands governed by regimes they dare not challenge. Squeezed between Arab royal families above and white Western power structures around them, they redirect their energy and wealth into one viable investment: the education of their children.

Those privileged children grow up between worlds, facing a profound social dilemma. They are shaped simultaneously by the Gulf’s monarchic conservatism and the West’s liberal progressivism while…… fully belonging to neither.

Those kids will produce BBC documentaries about queer people in Egypt, or denounce corruption in Syria and Algeria -And any Arabic states that have no wealth, Sheik or Amir- but fall silent about Gulf regimes that build their states on the shoulders of migrant laborers living in modern servitude. They will post photographs from formal receptions in Bahrain, or while partying in Dubai, without noticing the irony and the Hypocrisy of their case.

They speak in English about the American empire, they do hashtags, and shout on your face, everything is politics, and they post a picture of Edward Said, but they will never get really into politics, or fight for a true class or national struggle. They are not said to be; there is a gap between the old Arab bourgeoisie, as Edward Said and this new generation. Said will truly get into politics; he was a member of the PLO, and he donated and paid money. He wasn’t afraid to appear on American TV in the 80s defending the right to rise.

But the current Palestinian and Arab bourgeoisie has largely reduced a political struggle to a humanitarian aesthetic. The discourse they produced in the last three years framed the Palestinian cause as a matter of charity and victimhood, not resistance and sovereignty. It’s about narrative now; they cheer and celebrate Jewish Americans coming out for Palestine while refusing to give space for Palestinian politicians and resistance leaders. They are dismantling the Palestinians as a national and political project, for the sake of eating watermelon on the red carpet.

They will never be part of a true political or liberation movement, because true liberation would implicate the very structures that produced their comfort.

The harmful effect of their discourse goes beyond the Palestine issue. What makes this hypocrisy destructive is its selectivity. They criticize Arab states with republican systems — the kind Western audiences already distrust — while extending silent courtesy to monarchies aligned with Western capital. Those same monarchies that we all know since Nasser’s time are against the Palestinian liberation, and any true arab liberation project. Their criticism always lands safely. Their silence always protects what is profitable.

This is not ignorance. It is a strategy. And what happened recently to Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is proof that no amount of bourgeois camouflage can save you from the whims of royal madness. You can be wealthy, Kuwaiti and connected. You can spend years remaining silent about the regime your family served, while presenting yourself as the voice of Gaza. You can hide your Kuwaiti identity and citizenship behind the softer, more marketable label of “American-Palestinian.” You can master every performance of liberal respectability. But nothing will shield you from the unpredictable cruelty of royal whims.

A class that cannot afford to lose its footing in either world learns to calibrate its outrage with precision.

The petrodollar Arab bourgeoisie will fail, even if they occupy social media and red carpet in Western progressive cities for now. They will fail not because they lacked education or eloquence. But because, like Shahib el-dien, their cowardly audacity is not a character flaw, it is a class condition. And until that is named clearly, their performances of resistance will continue to substitute for the real thing.

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux was published in French by Gallimard in 2016. She was 76 years old, and she was 80 when the English translation by Alison L.Strayer was published in 2020 by Seven Stories Press. These are important details, as Ernaux writes in this book about herself as a girl in 1958, when she was 18.

If you are following and doing the math, I believe that you already know she was born in 1940, to a working family in a small coastal town in Normandy, where she lived all her childhood until she moved to study at the University of Rouen and then at the University of Bordeaux, obtaining a higher degree in philosophy and education in 1971. She worked most of her life as a teacher and then for 23 years at the French national distance‐education center (CNED). And on the side, she will start publishing her book from 1974, which creates literary controversies and sparks a critical war.

There is no middle ground with Ernaux — you either love her or hate her. For most of her life, up until the 1990s, she was dismissed by the French literary establishment, which struggled to categorize her work. Critics accused her books of lacking structure, of being too small — some barely reaching eighty pages. Ernaux also lived entirely outside the avant-garde literary circles; her life was rooted in the working class and in ordinary experience. That grounding left a permanent mark on her style: a prose that is austere, plain, direct, and stripped of ornament.

All Ernaux books could be read as one living book, all of them considered to be autobiographical, combining historical and individual experience. That makes reading any of her books a very individual experience, depending on whether this is your first book, or if you are an expert reader, and what you already know about her.

I am an old reader of Annie Ernaux, so before starting this book, I thought I already knew all the main lines of her life. I knew about her father, whom she wrote an entire book about. I knew about her ex-husband and her children. I knew she lived for twenty years in a place called Cergy-Pontoise, where she had to take the train for at least twenty minutes every day, because she wrote a book about that too. I knew about the brief love affair she had with a man thirty years younger than her, and the other with a Russian diplomat, because I read the book and watched the film. I also knew about her radical political activism, her support for the BDS movement, and for the Yellow Vest protests. You begin the book thinking you already know her, and Ernaux knows that. So in the first pages, she tells us there is another Annie, one she hid in a closed box for many years, forcing herself to forget her. It was the girl of 1958.

She introduces Annie, 58, as a girl who received a Catholic education in a school where she always felt out of place. Most girls were from middle-class families, daughters of doctors, engineers, and so on. She was also under her mother’s constant supervision. She was 18 years old but had never spoken to a boy or traveled outside of her town until the summer of 58, when she accepted a job as a summer camp counselor before going to university.

She is writing 50 years after this summer, which was her first taste of freedom, at that summer camp, she experienced her first sexual encounter—a night with an older man named H—that left her humiliated, isolated, and psychologically scarred. The event becomes the “missing piece” of her life story, the unspoken wound she could not narrate for more than half a century.

For Ernaux’s writing is an act of “naming the unnamable”, she transforms a fragmented, wordless experience into symbolic language. The gap between experience and survival mirrors the trauma structure: what cannot be processed in the moment returns decades later as repetition and silence. She writes to us, sharing with us all these details, but she will never say the words; the reader builds the meaning by reading between the lines.

Annie does this while she is performing the work of a non-fiction writer, searching through phone books and Google for the first man “H,” looking for the summer camp that disappeared, and no one in the area where it used to be remembers it. There is an act of investigation, but it’s an investigation that no one can fact-check. Ernaux herself find it hard to re-build some details, or to under stand why Annie 58 did that or this, or wrote about it this way, and what these personal events have to say about the whole country back then which was pushing forowrd it’s campigen to restrain order in Algeria, to Annie 58, who, like most of her generation, believed that Algeria should stay French.

When she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that the first penetration is always a rape, Ernaux begins to reframe what happened with H. But it’s up to the reader to name it. The same goes when she just from page to page will give us details about what was happening with the French campigen to instill laws and order in Algeria. She will not name what is going on, but clearly, as a reader, you could see the connection between this personal experience and the broader context of the French occupation of Algeria.

The book format is also fragmented; yes, it follows a chronological timeline, but it is still not linear. She jumps from scene to scene, from idea to idea, mainly focusing on Annie’s inner world, feelings, and thoughts, all of which are in the past, or reflecting on the past. In the last few page, Ernaux talk about a day in 1989 when she had to travel for a conference to England, in a day with no any meeting or events, all her colleagues made a plans to go the museum, but she decided to take the train then the bus, to go see the park and the place she used to hang out at in 1960 when she spent a year in London, “I am not a culture hound, the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure” (149)

It’s a book about writing not as a craft but as a brutal, painful adventure through your own memory, to create yourself and see the world around you in a new way.

A week after we moved to our house in downtown Las Vegas, I was locking our door on my way out when I was bombarded by a bird. Surprised and panicked, I started shouting and waving my hands wildly, trying helplessly to defend myself against the unseen enemy that had flown high after the initial strike. I walked to my car, and as I was opening the door, I heard the sound of a bird’s screech. This time, I saw it diving towards me, so I quickly jumped into the car and hid there.

It was the first but not the last. The Bird attacks become a regular ritual whenever I go in or out of our home. Yasmin noticed that they were nesting in the olive tree in our yard. She explained that they were just being protective “They could be immigrants like us. We should wait until they have the baby, then they will leave,” she added.

Even though the bird attacks didn’t stop, I had to plan defense strategies. I began by gathering intelligence: observing, spying, capturing photographs and videos of the enigmatic assailant. It was an elegant creature with a long tail, a slim body, and a lofty beak. Using Google Lens, I identified it as a mockingbird. Its attack patterns were unpredictable. Mockingbirds are notorious for their dive-bombing assaults, and “bombs” is indeed the correct term. After the initial strike, while you assess the damage, it circles back to attack and bomb you again, relentless in its pursuit.

I was new to Las Vegas, and I thought Las Vegans must come up with a defense strategy against these mockingbird bombs. I asked two friends who lived most of their lives in the valley if they ever were attacked by Vegas mockingbirds. Both never had. This is when I started to notice mockingbirds all over downtown, especially where there are olive trees.

It’s strange how small this valley is, how everything in the city is within a 30-minute drive. So it deceives you, and you walk around thinking that you know it as you know your hands while it keeps its secrets and true treasure hidden between tree branches. Some of them , like us and the birds, are travelers, immigrants searching for temporary shade.

I asked several American friends what to do against bird “dive bomb” attacks, and they all gave the same answer: “Shoot it.” Although I know it’s the American answer to most problems, I couldn’t risk my literary honor and reputation by becoming the writer who killed a mockingbird. Instead, I armed myself with a water gun. Every time I left the house, I would open the door, secure the scene, then sneak out slowly. Sometimes, I would notice the bird getting ready to attack and spray water to scare it off. But the moment I smiled in victory, it would strike from an unseen corner.

While I was busy losing my war with the mockingbird, my wife was giving them water and supplies. The bird didn’t attack her usually, but out of precision, she would open a black umbrella to shadow her and our daughter if they were going out.

Like many families in Vegas, we are an immigrant family. Our life, since Yasmin and I first met, has been a long road crossing through continents, oceans, states, and cities. We moved from place to place, seeking governments that will not shoot or jail us, and willing to grant us residency. After seven years of marriage, this house became our first nest.

Yasmin once whispered to me in a dream that to establish roots, we needed to understand our surroundings. Upon waking, she would make me listen to the mockingbird’s song, admiring its beauty. She explained that the bird might be a traveler, too, and this tree could have been its home for generations, a place where it once laid its eggs.

I started to get to know our neighbors by walking around and taking pictures of the birds, insects, feral cats, and rodents that live alongside us in the city. It’s an exercise I recommend: take pictures of your neighbors and get to know them. Introduce yourself if you can, and learn about them if you can’t. A time will come when you will confront each other, and maybe then, you won’t need walls or guns.

Another book that I was honored to take part in and write a chapter for is coming out next June

In How We See It, twelve of the most talented and insightful journalists from around the world probe their home countries’ complex relationship with the United States — and how this has swerved under the new administration.

A diverse, international cast of writers examines how Turkey’s recent history helps us understand America’s slide into autocracy, how Argentina’s century-long obsession with the dollar has changed under Trump, anti-American tourism sentiment in Italy, and what right-wing Americans get wrong about South Africa. Essays in the collection also look at how Taiwan is navigating the uncertainty of Trump’s response in the event of a Chinese invasion and the newly fraught view of the U.S. from Canada.

How We See It shifts and expands our frame of reference, our self-awareness, and our understanding of how much our world has changed since the election of 2024. Pre-order the book today!

.By accident—or luck—I ended up reading Berlin Game by Len Deighton.

What a quiet pleasure. I even bought the audiobook, just to stretch the experience. Now I walk for hours through downtown Las Vegas, where the sunset slips like a quiet lie across blood sky, the spring breeze mixed with weed and homelessness sweats, The streets hold their silence, in it my thinking draft with the narrtor voice as it moves through Berlin’s convoluted history—checkpoint routines, wartime memories.

The novel is set in the 1980s, in the middle of espionage operations between East and West—a world that no longer exists. Maybe that’s part of its appeal. It stands at a distance from the present, yet it feels uncomfortably familiar. The same games continue, only under different names.

I tried before to read John le Carré and found myself bored by what felt like patriotic rhetoric. There is a sense that he believes in the system he writes about. His novels sometimes read like refined propaganda for institutions. Deighton, on the other hand, is colder, more grounded. His gaze is shaped by class. His protagonists are ordinary clerks who happen to work for MI6, not tragic heroes carrying the fate of the world.

His prose is deliberately flat—clean, procedural, almost anti-literary. The tension sits in what is withheld.

Most striking, though, are the women in Berlin Game and in Deighton’s work more broadly. At first, they appear as background decoration, almost conventional. But as the story unfolds, you begin to notice something else: the threads are in their hands. Quietly, without announcement.

I finished the novel without knowing who is good or bad. Everything dissolves into gray. And when you strip away the mask of danger that surrounds intelligence work, what remains is something almost banal: an official, a clerk, pushing a cart in a supermarket, moving through the slow, heavy weight of days.

We find ourselves in Cairo in a post-2016 world, when a bald American girl arrives in what she feels is her homeland and the origin of her roots. Reading between the lines, we gather that she’s left America, fleeing from a sadness that she does not disclose. We know, because Noor Naga tells us from the first chapters that the American girl keeps shaving her head, but what she does not tell us is the reason behind her decision to remain bald. We also know that she is the daughter of Egyptian immigrant parents, that she graduated from Columbia University in New York, and that her father is a practicing physician in a clinic in the heart of Manhattan. Shocked at her decision to visit Egypt, her mother nevertheless makes the necessary calls, after which the daughter arrives, stays in a luxurious apartment in one of Cairo’s most affluent neighborhoods, and obtains a tidy job as an English teacher for adults, at the British Council.

Noor Naga begins her novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English with the promise of intense drama. An escape story, a trip home, secrets to unravel, but what truly gets one involved in the reading is her immensely fluid prose, as each sentence forces one to stop long enough to savor it slowly — prose that is highly complex and supremely intelligent.

When I arrived at Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. Nowhere you looked wasn’t people. They clogged every street and then piled on top of each other in buildings twenty stories high. Many were not even Egyptian. You could turn into an alley and find fifty Sudanese men, bluer than black, with cheeks like shoulder blades and ankles like knives, or else women as tall as I am, women so pale you could see rivered blood at their wrists and neck. I heard twenty Arabics in my first week and wherever I went people asked me — sometimes in English because of the hair — Where you from?

Naga’s novel is divided into three main parts. In the first movement of the operetta, there are short pieces, each one limited to two pages in length. They all begin with “What if” and have a transcendent feel to them: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, should your mother be punished?” The narration alternates between two voices, the American girl and a boy from Shobrakheit, who appears as a partner in the novel. Naga describes his upbringing in a village on the margins of the Egyptian countryside, raised by a possessive grandmother who envelopes him in a private world, in which she feeds him with her hands. The two share a bed and bathe together. When his grandmother dies in 2011, he heads to Cairo with his camera, a gift from his grandmother, only to arrive in a city that is in the midst of a revolution. He soon finds himself part of a new group being shaped by the city’s tumultuous uprising, streets, city squares and gas bombs.

Enraptured by the new social order, he captures it all on his camera, and it’s not long before the TV stations and news agencies are racing to publish the photographs he takes from the heart of Tahrir, the Square, that document the clashes taking place. Two years later, the revolution is defeated, and the now world-class photographer from Shobrakheit loses his sense of purpose and questions the meaning of his existence, hanging up his camera and refusing to take any more photos that would document a “fake reality.” With dwindling resources, he moves into a hovel in one of Cairo’s boroughs. His subsequent addiction leads him on a path of self-destruction.

By this point, readers can easily predict how the rest of the story will unfold. The American girl will meet the boy from Shobrakheit, they’ll fall in love, until it all dramatically falls apart. It’s a tale that’s been repeated over and over again in fiction, particularly in the years following Egypt’s 2011 revolution. A popular tale because of its intimacy, especially for a reader like me who lived his life in downtown Cairo and witnessed the beginning and end of dozens of such similar stories. Moreover, for the past decade or so, this is a theme that has been recurrent in Egyptian literature written in Arabic. What Naga does however, is turn this straightforward, simplistic theme into horrific scenes and landscapes in which social class and political identity clash, culminating in a tragic crime.

Egyptian Literature

The history of Egyptian literature, written in English, can be divided into two phases. The first is Egyptian writers born and raised in Egypt for whom English formed an essential part of their education due to their social class, such as Wajuih Ghali, Samia Serageldin, Ahdaf Soueif and others. A sense of alienation presents itself in various forms in the writings of that period, mainly a sense of not belonging within the class the writer occupies. The only exception, perhaps, is Wajuih Ghali, who rebelled against his own class, certainly in the novel Beer in the Snooker Club.

The second phase includes writing from the children of Egyptian immigrants, which began in the ‘70s and continues to this day. According to official Egyptian government figures, the number of Egyptians residing abroad is close to ten million. Estimates from the Egyptian embassy in the United States put the figure of those who live in the US at one million, though this is contradicted by the US Census Bureau, which estimates Egyptian emigrants at a quarter of a million. Regardless of these different figures, this nation of millions living in the diaspora has become part of the modern Egyptian identity, reshaping the meaning of Egypt, and presenting its image through its artistic and literary works, especially as many within this group possess material and scientific capabilities that allow them the power of autonomous representation, or as Naga asks in her novel, “If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?”

Noteworthy is the fact that Egyptians residing abroad who speak different languages — and like the protagonist of the novel study in prestigious universities — transfer, according to the Egyptian government’s latest figures, more than 30 billion dollars annually to the country, representing 8% of the government’s total budget. And so the question that one asks oneself here is if the American girl, with her English, is really able to tell the tale of the boy from Shobrakheit.

Language, English in this case, is an impediment that imposes a rift within the life of the American girl moving to Egypt, and those around her. Her poor command of Arabic exposes her and makes everyone ask her where she’s from. Add to that the writer’s decision not to name her protagonist, to refer to her only as the “American girl,” seems to enforce that idea, despite her Egyptian heritage and time spent in Egypt, language continues to be a barrier to communication, even after she falls in love with the boy from Shobrakheit and he moves in to live with her in her luxury apartment.

The boy from Shobrakheit, who was raised in the care of a smothering grandmother, sits next to the American girl while she eats and expects her, like his grandmother, to feed him. The American feminist soon finds herself in a relationship that has turned her into a dispossessed woman — one who goes to work in the morning, while her male partner sits at home waiting for her to come back to cook and clean, while he does nothing except watch videos on YouTube.

The American girl soon loses herself within a world dominated by Arabic and a system of social codes that she is unable to decipher or navigate. Subtly, changes within her behavior take shape in a before and after Egypt form. Prior to her arrival in Egypt, the American girl had been a political activist, who had once revolted against a man and led a whole subway car against him in New York when she witnessed him harassing a veiled woman. The scene had been filmed and even gone viral. However, in Egypt, we see her remain silent, when her friend, the owner of a famous restaurant, refuses to seat two veiled girls in his establishment, because their hijab would put off the “clean Egyptians,” the rich bourgeoisie, decked in Western brands.

In the second part of the novel as the two voices continue to alternate, Noor Naga introduces detailed footnotes that readers assume are likely guidelines for familiarizing the non-Egyptian reader with Egypt, such as its foods that include the different varieties of mangoes, as well as foul, our traditional dish made of fava beans. However, as an Egyptian, these footnotes left me ill at ease, as they appeared to contain errors and factual details that did not add up. I was particularly drawn to one referencing a Nubian writer by the name of Sayed Dhaif, whom I had never heard of and could not find in any of my searches. When I sent the author an enquiry, she admitted that she had, in fact, invented the character. He was not real and neither were a number of other “facts” in her footnotes.

And so it is that the author sets up several traps in the novel for the reader who looks upon literature as an accurate representation of its subject. She ingenuously casts these traps to mimic the American girl’s interpretation regarding the realities of life around her in Egypt, in which she fails to distinguish between the facts and lies that the boy from Shobrakheit makes up. The ensuing confusion and the difficulty of differentiating between the multiple narratives around what is real and what isn’t reaches its climax when it comes to the details of the pair’s relationship. The scene that the boy from Shobrakheit paints is one of unbridled love, while the American girl portrays one of violence.

Trapped within a relationship in which she is unable to distinguish between love and abuse, things escalate slowly until at one point, the boy from Shobrakheit hurls a coffee table at her, inflicting severe wounds and bruises. It is only when the boy from Shobrakheit finally disappears that she is able to return to the remnants of her former life. She ends up meeting an American man living in Cairo, and further entanglements ensue when the boy from Shobrakheit dies, a mystery readers will have to work out for themselves.

Naga plays around with light and shadows, and like a magician manipulates the reality we see in front of us, making us doubt the veracity of whatever her narrators tell us right up to the moment when all is revealed in the last chapter.

Throughout the novel, Noor Naga toys, like a magician, with light and shadow, obscuring certain details while revealing others, casting doubt on everything, right up to the final chapter in which readers encounter the American girl, back in America, discussing, with colleagues in a creative writing class, the final chapter of her novel.It’s a final chapter that readers of this novel aren’t privy to but rather garner its content from the commentary of the American girl’s classmates as they share their critical take on it. The American narrator’s colleagues discuss her novel filtered through the lens of a contemporary American values system as one colleague objects to her empathy with the boy from Shobrakheit, arguing that her writing serves to perpetuate sympathy for the oppressor, and legitimizes violence against women.

Another reader asks the writer for more details related to Egypt, mining her for exciting features that play to an imagined sensibility of a distant place. All the while, the American girl is silent, happy to merely take in the comments, as if the author, having explained her two protagonists in previous chapters, surprises English readers with a mirror that reflects their own questions. In the end, it is one colleague only who focuses his comments on the technical components of the novel and advises her to delete the last chapter, which is exactly what she does. Hence, its unavailability within this novel despite everyone talking about it in this novel’s final chapter.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is a novel much like Egyptian mangoes, whose taste lingers on the tongue long after the last bite.

There was a time when fascism wore its uniform proudly: Flags. Massive banners. Boots shining under the sun.

Today?
Nothing like that.
Fascism today is stylish. It wears a plain white/black T-shirt and smiles at you through a mobile app.

We are entering the age of networked fascism.
No nations.
No borders.
Just companies, cryptocurrencies, Oligarchies, private cities glimmering like mirages in the desert, and shiny promises of a “smart and sustainable future.”

Imagine being nothing more than a visitor in your own homeland.
Imagine becoming a “user” in a country governed by Terms of Service.

This is how they want it.

No gunshots, no screaming.
Just a tiny checkbox you click without thinking.
You surrender your privacy, your language, your memory — in exchange for a free update.

How do we resist this?

‘O my friends,Pay attention to the words that deceive you every day:
“Smart city”? An open-air prison.
“Active user”? A willing slave.
“Social network”? A marketplace for performance.

‘O my friends, Language was always the first battlefield of fascism. Pay attention the flower that rise from our children graveyard.

Today, more than ever, we must doubt every word we think we understand.

Modern fascism/ Tech-Zionism hates the streets.
It hates random collisions, spontaneous laughter, conversations that start because a table is too close.
It wants you clean, separated, smoothed at the edges.

But edges are your life. Friction is your last defense.

And what about politics?

Is politics boring? Yes.
But it’s the last weapon we have before we’re turned into products sitting neatly on the shelves of the future.

No flags.
No slogans.
No shots fired into the air.
Just a “Privacy Policy” you agree to as you yawn.

We must return to politics, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s noisy.
Because it’s messy.
Because it still allows us to make mistakes and shout, to protest and dissent.

All we have is our beautiful chaos, ‘O my friends; Scattered stories, Loud voices, Spontaneous gatherings, Incomplete but living ideas

It cannot tolerate a burst of laughter in the middle of a crowded street.
It cannot tolerate a short story that doesn’t lead to a neat ending.

That’s why every piece of chaos, every story, every random encounter is a small battle against them.

That’s why every yawn in which you refuse blind consent is a declaration of war.

Hold on to your chaos.

Hold on to your stories.
Hold on to your streets

s

I dreamed I entered a restaurant, and I saw Joyce Carol Oates eating noodle baby soup, with human fetuses floating in it. When I looked at the menu, it wasn’t there, so I asked the waiter. He told me it’s a special dish—you have to order it three days in advance because they get the baby fetuses fresh from Gaza.

The waiter was Etgar Keret. He had a wonderful smile, words were dripping out of his mouth, juicy and crispy at the same time, in total he was an eye candy, but even in the dream, I knew better—not to trust short story writers.

I didn’t have any money, but I was hungry. So I ordered their new Vertical AI Sushi Roll, which was named “Ocean Vuong.” That’s when I had to wake up. I couldn’t take such a nightmare any longer.

The first time I seriously thought about writing in English was exactly ten years ago.

I was sitting inside an open metal cage in Torah Prison, waiting to be called into the warden’s office, to go from there to the visiting room, where I was supposed to meet my mom and Yasmin. A young police officer stood beside the cage and asked me:

“Do you have Samira’s number?”

I panicked. I thought he was accusing me of having a cell phone, which was forbidden. plus I didn’t know any Samira.

So I told him, “I don’t have a phone. I don’t have anyone’s number.”

He laughed.

“I mean Samira, the character in your novel Using Life.”

I gave him the kind of smile you give when you have no teeth left to defend yourself. He leaned closer to the cage.

“Great crazy novel, by the way. But listen, do you want my honest opinion?”

I didn’t answer. He gave it anyway.

“You shouldn’t write in Arabic. No one here will understand what you’re trying to do. Don’t you know English?”

I nodded.

“You should write in English. Tomorrow, when you leave this country, forget this language. Write in English.”

I never saw him again.

I left Egypt two years later. On the third anniversary of that prison encounter, in April 2019, I landed in Las Vegas. At first, I was still living in Las Vegas but writing in Arabic. My work would be published there and later translated into English. I was physically in America, but linguistically elsewhere.

It was during the Black Lives Matter protests that something shifted in me. I went with my friends to a protest. It was a déjà vu experience, everything was different, yet similar and familiar at the same time.

People’s clothes and colors were different, but the despair, the contained anger in their eyes, was familiar. The police guns were bigger, yet the way they organized, surrounded, and slowly broke the protest felt similar.

And most importantly, I understood that it was the same battle.

When the police began tightening their grip, I told my friends I needed to leave. I was, after all, a legal alien. Getting arrested, or even being filmed by the police cameras above the buildings, could make me an illegal alien.

After that protest, I felt an urge to write in English, to speak to my friends, to engage, to be part of this battle, and the collective search of this generation for new desires, and meaning for life…. and most importantly to find my place in the new land, and to break out of the deja vu loop.

The first English piece I wrote tasted like sand. But I continued building one sandcastle after another.

At the same time, as I was trying to understand the American literary scene, it became clear to me that to be a writer in English, you either move to Brooklyn, or you get an MFA. I chose the second option.

The first semester was overwhelming.

A desert I felt I had to cross alone.

In my first workshops, my question to my colleagues was always the same: “If you didn’t know I was the writer, how would you imagine the writer of this text?”

I was obsessed with sounding like the other. I wanted my English to be indistinguishable from the American English I was reading.

But it was in Doug’s workshop — and through the feedback of my peers — that I began to notice something unexpected: the more I allowed the un-American parts of my English to slip into my sentences, the more engaged they became.

And it was in Professor Sidhartha’s class that I discovered the wider Anglophone world.

I began to understand that the English I was writing belonged to a long tradition of immigrants, of displaced writers, of those who bend the language until it carries another one inside it.

That was when I finally found a place for my feet in the ocean of English.

And that is when the seed of this novel was born.

During my three years in the MFA, I witnessed the American–Zionist machine launch its most vicious regional war in the Middle East.

What we are seeing is not a temporary conflict but a structural reordering of the region and its people. A new world is being shaped; new monsters are being born, with Israel implanted not only as a military strike force but as a functional power tasked with organizing the region’s security and economic architecture.

This “far-right” fantasy operates within an imperial division of labor, enforced through advanced AI killing machines and enormous firepower, all funded by taxpayer money.

It is my worst nightmare, but I can see it coming and what is being tested there will soon be deployed here: against immigrants, against the American working class, and against any opposition to the rule of tyranny and the law of the jungle being forced upon the world…. And lately we are witnessing the same drones that were deployed in Gaza are now used in our city. The AI components that empowered the genocide are now used for surveillance and catching immigrants in our communities.

I spent these three years living a double life: witnessing the killing and destruction of my Arabic language, culture, and ways of living, while at the same time living inside — and contributing to — the system enabling that destruction.

This double life became sharper and more isolating, intensified by the growing climate of repression around freedom of speech that we have watched expand across American academia over the last two years — including here, at my own university.

I woke up to the news, drove to class with all these images and cries in my head, which I work hard to suppress in the classroom.

This double Schizophrenia life is the soil from which this novel sprouted. Its ambition is to offer a fictional double image of America… I am interested in writing in English to show the reader the Schizophrenic life they are enduring, and the true reason for all mental health delusions that are forced on them.

So this novel is about the double life, and double voices, with near future dystopian at the background, and that is what my novel “The pigeonhole principle” is about