\u201cSolomon: It is power, Bilqis, that sometimes blinds us to our human limitations and makes us forget the wisdom bestowed upon us. It tempts us to pursue a hopeless struggle. What do you think of me now? What color will your smile be if the wisdom of Solomon is mentioned in your presence?\u201d<\/p>\n
Tawfiq al-Hakim draws upon accounts of the story of King Solomon and Queen Bilqis found in the Quran, the Torah, and One Thousand and One Nights to craft this play. In it, he explores humanity\u2019s extraordinary power and its frequent limitations, choosing the human heart as the medium for portraying these limitations, particularly the emotion of love, which cannot be attained by force, even when that force is wielded with the utmost wisdom. This is evident in the events of the play when the genie Dahish fails to fulfill King Solomon’s command to win Bilqis’s heart, as her heart belongs to Mundhir, a prisoner in her custody, who is in turn in love with her handmaiden, Al-Shahba. Despite Bilqis’s awareness of Mundhir and Al-Shahba’s love and her acceptance of it, her heart does not incline towards King Solomon. She is content with their friendship and decides to return to her kingdom. A short time later, termites announce the king’s death by eating away at his staff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The play revolves around the conflict between wisdom, power, and human emotion, through a story inspired by the figure of the Prophet Solomon, revealing the limits of power in the face of the heart’s feelings and the complexities of the human psyche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":27830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[909,940,919,834],"product_tag":[2687,2728,1359,1122],"class_list":["post-27832","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-islamic-literature","product_cat-arabic-literature","product_cat-literary-plays","product_cat-philosophy","product_tag-islam","product_tag-literature","product_tag-philosophy","product_tag-wisdom","pa_book-author-tawfiq-al-hakim","first","onbackorder","sale","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/27832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=27832"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=27832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}