[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Arabic (English tr. Yasser Bahjatt)
country: Saudi Arabia
year: 2013
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 16.1.23
I forget how I found out about Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt’s HWJN (I’m not totally clear what the translation situation is, but it seems like fundamentally the book is by Ibraheem Abbas and Bahjatt translated it, but he’s listed as “co-author” — my guess is that Bahjatt is responsible for the extensive localizations that explain things like different prayer times and traditional forms of address), but I finally went down to the special collection today to read it, since unfortunately it’s not circulating. it’s a quick read: 258 pages but typeset in a very large font, so it only took me like two and a half hours to read (with a few breaks).
it’s a weird little novel — part paranormal romance, as the title character, a jinni named Hawjan, falls in love with a human college student named Sawsan; part fantasy, as Hawjan (a Muslim) navigates jinn politics as his relatives try to coerce him into giving up his faith; part science fantasy as it sets out to integrate jinn into a more or less rationalist, but still thoroughly Islamic, conception of the contemporary world. fundamentally, HWJN asks: if jinn exist to be addressed by the Qur’an just as humans are, and they inhabit the same world humans do but in a kind of parallel existence, what would that look like in ca. 2013? this is a cool question, and the world-building around jinn life and society and its relationship to the human world was definitely the highlight of the book for me.
Qummah had been the thriving heart of our kingdoms, but now it had deteriorated. It had become a wasteland. That was the cost of Human expansion. As you spread we retreat.
the romance aspect of it is…bland. uninspiring. deeply heterosexual. Hawjan sees Sawsan when she and her human family move into the empty villa he and his jinn family have been living in and basically immediately falls in love with her. they learn to communicate, first through a ouija board and then through Sawsan’s tablet. Hawjan’s jinn relatives start messing around, among other things by giving Sawsan brain cancer, and finally Hawjan, a human friend of Sawsan’s (later her fiancé), and Hawjan’s jinn wife (complicated political arrangement) have to undertake an elaborate plot spanning both the human and jinn dimensions in order to stop Sawsan’s father from selling his soul to the devil in order to save Sawsan’s life.
the religious aspect was really striking: this is unquestionably Islamic fantasy, and not in the way that (say) Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon is: Hawjan is an observant Muslim — and in line with the Wahhabi state, as he ultimately drops the sorcerer who’s been leading Sawsan’s father astray off at a vice prevention office for the state to deal with him. both Sawsan (whose family has some servants) and her human friend (whose family appears to be wildly rich and whose father wants him to do an MBA) are clearly bourgeois and there’s no interrogation whatsoever of class, except in a kind of generic religious anti-materialism (criticizing people for putting other things above god, with the criticism expressed in Islamic terms as a critique of polytheism/idolatry) that doesn’t seem to extend to, say, Sawsan’s friend’s family wealth. the thing that (officially, at least) got it banned — after becoming a bestseller in Saudi Arabia — was the fact that Sawsan and her friends communicate with Hawjan by means of a ouija board, which apparently promotes sorcery and devilry among young women.
it’s emphatic about religious and racial tolerance: Hawjan meets Christian and Jewish jinn (and jinn of “all races”, or “many races”; I forget the exact wording), for example, in addition to Muslims and servants of the devil, and he comments explicitly on the fact that religion can’t divide them when they’re united by other common interests. in spite of its explicit calls for tolerance, though, it undercuts itself first by having the evil sorcerer be “Shaikh Mussa Takkaw, an African sorcerer” (with an accent, too); I have a suspicion this may be a reference to “Aladdin” but it doesn’t make it less dubious. and, ultimately, after an exploration of human-jinn relationships that seems like a parable about racism and miscegenation, the book concludes by having Hawjan and Sawsan’s friend participate in an elaborate gaslighting scheme to convince Sawsan that all of the jinn stuff was a hallucination while she had a brain tumor. Hawjan settles down with his jinni wife and Sawsan marries the human man, so actually, even though Hawjan and Jumara set out for the jinn settlement of Hindabah, “where citizens lived under the principles of freedom and justice and let go of all racism”, there is an uncrossable racial (indeed, dimensional) boundary that it’s natural/correct/what have you to stay on your own side of. hmm.
the translation is, on the whole, not too bad. conversational in style, with a few malapropisms (“feminism” in place of “femininity”, in one memorable case) and some punctuation issues (misplaced commas, mainly).
one other humor highlight:
“I haven’t slept in the past twenty-four hours, and I haven’t eaten anything, I’ve been possessed by a Jinn twice, and I’ve swallowed four tramodol, four Tegretol, and three Red Bulls. I think I am pretty much ready [to get possessed by a jinni again].”
anyway, all told I gave it 3.5. it was a reasonably enjoyable and fast read, just with. some issues.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, wacky