Author Basma Abdel Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times piece about Middle Eastern authors who are writing dystopian fiction. Aziz is a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, and it seems that both her profession and her experience of the Arab Spring have informed her storytelling. Aziz has been compared to both Orwell and Kafka for reasons that will be obvious to readers of The Queue. This novel features an unnamed Middle Eastern city that has experienced political turmoil and rioting and is now ruled […]
Resist the urge to go fetal
He was a wannabe gangster and a high school dropout who got tattoos, drank and smoked, and sold drugs on the streets of Jordan. His mother was so concerned, she sent him to Muslim self-help classes. There, Ahmad Fadil found a new path. By the time he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, Fadil-by then known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi- had lead a new terrorist insurgency in Iraq and Jordan that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That group was ISIS. […]
Oh, the places you’ll go!
It was months after 9/11 when Rory Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan. The country was in disarray, but despite warnings from the Afghan government, villagers and anyone with a lick of common sense, Stewart insisted on going. One foreign journalist, after hearing his plan, asked Stewart if he’d ever read Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s story of an American dumbass who tried to make it in the Alaskan wilderness without any supplies (I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but […]
Mindbending
So I finally read Alif the Unseen. Wow — what a genre-bender. So many questions about belief, ideology, loyalty, technology, humanity, and identity are explored across multiple metaphysical planes and in achingly familiar real-world contexts. To back up to a plot summary, which I’ll ape from Goodreads: “In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and […]