Jannat and Iblis

Description

“Jannat! Her name rings strangely in her ears, as if she’s hearing it for the first time. Who could be calling her? Who among the millions of names in the universe could know her name? She squeezes her eyelids open. A leather belt feels tight around her head. She tries to sit up, leaning on her elbow, but the world spins around her, and the voice still calls to her.”

Through a world between wakefulness and sleep, where numerous realms and spaces of reality and imagination, religion and tradition, names and their meanings intertwine, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi paints her novel with her characteristic boldness. Jannat, a girl who grew up suffering oppression, marginalization, and persecution, tries to find answers to her questions about religion, women, and life. And “Iblis,” the young man burdened by the stigma of evil, rebels from time to time—through his own questions—against his father, who is also his sheikh, his general, and his lord, until he dies and his father learns that he is innocent of all evil, and of the whispers that everyone imagined him to be the source of. All of this unfolds within a dramatic plot reminiscent of abstract paintings, whose symbols can be deciphered anew each day.