5. Rewriting Patriarchy

A double killing. A rape. The world of The Thousand and One Nights. The world of test-tube men. No, this is not the latest episode in a television serial. It is the literary universe of El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam (Suqût al-Imâm). The female hero of this novel, like other lower-class Saadawian rebels, is ultimately killed. But unlike Firdaws in Woman at Point Zero, she rises again to continue the struggle. For The Fall of the Imam is not a social novel in the realist tradition. It is a daring mythical creation, a recasting of the patriarchal system that pervades the Islamic and Judeo-Christian religious traditions, as it does the Middle East and the West.^[1] Among the most important weapons of this devastating attack on the collusion of political and religious patriarchy is a series of textual games played with the literary texts and the holy words of these traditions themselves, from The Thousand and One Nights to the Qur’ân.

Summarizing a metafictional postmodern novel like The Fall of the Imam would mean weaving a plot where one does not exist. In this text, first- and third-person narrators coexist. A single chapter can have up to three different voices. Events repeat; the identity of characters is cast into doubt.

An ambitious work of fiction, The Fall of the Imam creates a mythical world inhabited by, among others, a male ruler, the Imam. Surrounded by a coterie of ministers and the standard paraphernalia of male political power, the Imam rules over a land described as “the other world.” His wife is a woman of Christian origin who hails from lands “beyond the sea” and who has converted to Islam. During the annual Victory Holiday, the Imam is killed, and at the end of the novel he goes to a heaven seemingly controlled by Christians. Parallel to the Imam is Bint Allâh, the Daughter of God. A student in a nursing school, she lays her paternity at the Deity’s door. She also is killed, but her demise comes about during a religious holiday. Neither character dies only once, however. Each death, that of the Imam and that of Bint Allâh, is repeated obsessively throughout the novel in a complex cyclical pattern. Indeed, the novel combines synchronic discussions and aspects of the Imam’s world with an overlay (or is it under?) of this mythic, even ritual, cycle of murder. Although this imaginary earthly kingdom is no specified place, it has the uncanny familiarity of a Middle Eastern country. This “other world” is visited by the test-tube man, whose previous love is the Christian wife of the Imam. He becomes part of the Imam’s entourage, eventually returning to his own land.

The Imam who stutters when delivering his speech; the Victory Holiday during which he is killed: these are but two elements that point to a possible identity between Nawal El Saadawi’s fictional creation and the real Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, whose assassination was brought into the homes of television viewers the world around. The male critic Sabry Hafez, in a review of El Saadawi’s work, uses this resemblance to belittle her literary achievement.^[2]

The political similarity is largely superficial, though, for the Imam is more than Sadat. “Imam” as a title, of course, refers to the Imam Khomeiny as well, perhaps the most visible and most formidable Middle Eastern religious leader in this century. His role as the patriarch par excellence (with his long beard, his hand raised in a blessing) fits in well with the male-dominated system of this Saadawian novel. Sadat on the one hand, Khomeiny on the other. But one would need more hands to cover the political world of The Fall of the Imam. Bint Allâh’s brother is named Fadl Allâh. Is it an accident that this is also the name of a prominent Lebanese Shî‘î religio-political leader?^[3] The Imam’s Christian wife recalls Queen Nûr of Jordan. The Imam’s world is no single, identifiable land. It is a generic Middle Eastern country. It is the system laid bare, what one has after all the superficial differences are removed.

It is the universality of the patriarchal system that dominates. The Great Writer (this is how he is referred to in the text) tells us that when he received this title, the Imam provided him with gifts: a new house, a new wife, and the best possible furniture.^[4] Note the gender implications of this series: the new wife is sandwiched between the new house and the best furniture. Not only is she a mere object handed over from one male to another, but she is embedded within the confines of the physical world of house and furniture. Her domestic existence is foregrounded. And what about the prize the Great Writer is also awarded during the “Literature and Arts Celebration?”^[5] How familiar this sounds to anyone who has attended conferences in the Middle East at which these prizes are awarded!

(A personal anecdote: I saw Nawal El Saadawi in Cairo in November 1989, just after she had returned from Libya. There, she had received a prize from the Libyan leader: a gold embossed plaque extolling her virtues and the work she had done for the liberation of Arab women. I must admit that, like El Saadawi, I found the entire project ironic. In a sense, she had been made—though for but one brief moment—to join the great patriarchal political establishment. Though she was clearly flattered by the gesture, I could not help but wonder if it reminded her of her own fictional creation. Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Libya—the differences are only superficial.)

But it is not only political regimes that resemble one another, however. The males who surround the Imam are also quasi-identical. There is, for example, the Body Guard, whose job it is to stand in for the Imam and who wears a false elastic face that looks like that of the political leader. So effective is the substitution that the Body Guard with his false face is the one who falls when the Imam is killed. No matter: another male is quickly substituted for the Body Guard/Imam, and no one is the wiser.^[6] Then there is the Great Writer and the Leader of the Legal Opposition Party. School buddies of the Imam, they are nameless but for their descriptive appellations, which define their official function in the Imam’s political and social world. Their identities remain tied to that of the ultimate father figure, causing an ambiguity in their individuality that helps to make of them but one character.

Unified though the political vision may be, it is far from immune to El Saadawi’s savage wit. The Imam in fact appointed the Legal Opposition Party, we learn. Its leader was given a monthly allowance, a daily newspaper, a seat in the Parliament, and a palace on Mîdân al-Hurriyya (Liberty Square).^[7] In the imaginary (and fictional) universe of the Imam, this is a most appropriate name—not too different from the famous Mîdân al-Tahrîr (Liberation Square) in Cairo, but different enough that the two are not linked immediately. How nice a commentary it also makes on many a square in many a Third World country, where the words liberty and freedom too often get bandied about in quite a cavalier fashion.

Beware, however. This is not a novel that denigrates the Middle East in favor of some Western political construct. This is a novel that questions the larger cultural and civilizational constructs of both the East and the West, centering on an issue common to both: the plight of women.

And what better place to explore the intersection of gender and the religio-political arena than with the onomastic references in the text? Bint Allâh, the Daughter of God, is the central female in The Fall of the Imam. She is flanked in the novel by her brother, Fadl Allâh, and her sister, Ni‘mat Allâh. All three grew up in the orphanage known as Bayt al-Atfâl, the House of Children. The names of the three siblings are all constructed with the word Allâh, God. Fadl and Ni‘mat both inherently convey the same relationship to the Deity: that of kindness, favor, and blessing. Both, moreover, are real names in the complex Arabic onomastic system, in which names constructed with the word Allâh abound.^[8] Bint Allâh is the odd name out; directly connected to God, it poses both an onomastic and a theological problem.

Onomastic first. To someone who does not think about what the words mean, the name Bint Allâh sounds right—and well it should. It combines in mellifluous Arabic two name elements, each of which seems to be in its appropriate location. The first element, Bint or “Daughter of,” is found in such female names as Bint al-Shâti’, while Allâh is familiar as the second part of the ubiquitous ‘Abd Allâh. By a subversive game of paradigmatic substitution, Nawal El Saadawi has created a shocking onomastic ungrammaticality.

A slightly less disruptive version of this game is played in the names of the two political parties. The Imam’s party is Hizb Allâh (the Party of God) and that of the opposition, the Hizb al-Shaytân (the Party of Satan). The Hizb Allâh, an Islamic party that has played (and continues to play) such an important role in the Lebanese Civil War, is by now a household name in the United States, and its leader is commonly mentioned as being Shaykh Fadl Allâh.^[9] And the Hizb al-Shaytân? What a radical notion! This is not the name of some satanic cult that has crept into the novel; it is the name of the opposition party in the Imam’s political universe, whose head he himself appoints. The names Hizb Allâh and Hizb al-Shaytân deliberately violate the unspoken rules of Arabic political semiotics. The success of this onomastic game (as in the case of Bint Allâh) relies on its exploitation of the rules of both the Arabic language and the Arabo-Islamic onomastic system: the replacement in the grammatical genitive construction (on the one hand, a noun preceding Allâh and, on the other, a noun following hizb) are semantically appropriate. After all, if one can have Fadl Allâh, why can one not have Bint Allâh; and if one can have Hizb Allâh, why can one not have Hizb al-Shaytân?

The combinations (Bint Allâh and Hizb al-Shaytân) border on sacrilege precisely because they violate unspoken cultural rules and call attention to a central theological problem, that of God’s unity and transcendence. The two highly loaded words Shaytân and Allâh often function paradigmatically, as in the oft-repeated phrase “A‘ûdhu bil-Lâh min al-Shaytân al-Rajîm” (I seek God’s protection from Satan the Damned).^[10] The paradigmatic relationship between Hizb Allâh and Hizb al-Shaytân already exists in the Qur’ân (Sûrat al-Mujâdala, verses 19–22). There, however, the terms refer not to political parties, but to the saved and the damned, respectively. It is clear why a political party would want to identify itself with the saved. But a party of the damned? Hizb al-Shaytân by its very existence calls into question the whole notion of Hizb Allâh—that is, the setting up of a relationship between the Deity and a political party. Reattaching the Qur’ânic Hizb al-Shaytân to the modern political context of Hizb Allâh makes the association of God and political party seem almost absurd. It ridicules the collusion of politics and religion in patriarchal power—one of the principal targets of The Fall of the Imam.

The subversion implied by the name Bint Allâh goes beyond politics. Among other things, it deftly exposes the patriarchal assumptions of Christianity. If a son of God, why not a daughter of God? For Islam, the challenge is more forthright. Bint Allâh is a theological bid‘a or innovation (understood as a negative term). Her mere name violates the unity and transcendence of the Deity, tawhîd. This is a central doctrine in Islam, of which the proclamation—the creed—is the first pillar of Islam. As John L. Esposito puts it, this creed “affirms Islam’s absolute monotheism, an unshakable and uncompromising faith in the oneness or unity (tawhîd) of God.”^[11] So heretical is the name Bint Allâh that a believing Muslim called it blasphemy in my presence. If we understand the nature of bid‘a properly, that to be accused of it is “equivalent to the charge of heresy in Christianity,”^[12] the shock of the name for a Muslim reader becomes clear.

While one might overlook the more excusable political connections to the Deity in the name Hizb Allâh, it is much more difficult to do so with Bint Allâh, since her relationship to the Deity is literally more intimate. Bint Allâh in fact asserts many times in the novel that her father is God. But how can this be? We, as readers, know that Bint Allâh is conscious of the physical dilemma involved in having the Deity as father. She relates an exchange she has with her sister, Ni‘mat Allâh, after hearing part of the first three verses, so famous, from the Qur’ânic Sûrat al-Ikhlâs: “Qul, huwa Allâhu ahad, lam yalid wa-lam yûlad” [Say, He is God, One, who has not begotten, and has not been begotten].^[13] Ni‘mat Allâh poses the problem when she then turns to Bint Allâh and asks, “Did God not beget Jesus Christ?”^[14] Is it any wonder that the Chief of Security upon hearing Bint Allâh’s name says, “Your name is in itself a crime of unbelief?”^[15]

If giving God children is a frontal assault on the most fundamental of all Islamic theological notions, endowing him with a daughter is a far more subtle jab. Verses from the Sûrat al-Nahl, generally understood as condemning the Meccan cult of a number of goddesses worshipped as daughters of Allâh, read: “And they assign to God daughters; glory be to Him!—and they have their desire; and when any of them is given the good tidings of a girl, his face is darkened.”^[16] Among the arguments of these verses is the notion of the incongruity of people who themselves do not respect the female child attributing daughters to God.

Given that preference for male offspring is far from extinct in Arab society today, the name of El Saadawi’s female hero plays, in its own way, and of course on a totally different register, with this incongruity. (Interestingly, Nawal El Saadawi told me with great pride that when it came time to publish The Fall of the Imam in Cairo, the publisher, the well-known Nasserite and leftist Muhammad Fâ’iq, asked her to change Bint Allâh’s name to something else. She staunchly refused, arguing that it would alter the entire thesis of the book.)^[17]

Once the complexities of the Saadawian onomastic system are uncovered, once we understand that more is at issue here than mere naming, we have entered a different realm. The Fall of the Imam becomes then a heavily coded novel, whose intertextual games are not improper twists of “universally known” facts (as Sabry Hafez argues)^[18] but a rewriting and recasting of the enormous Arabic literary and religio-cultural textual tradition, whose weight one feels El Saadawi carrying on her shoulders.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the literary and religious intertext of The Fall. Verses from the Qur’ân and stories from the hadîth, those quasi-anecdotal collections of sayings and actions of the Prophet, are richly interspersed in this highly complex novel. Most provocative in this intertext is its reflection of powerful cultural and civilizational forces. Let us take two examples.

The Christian wife of the Imam, beseeching the Deity to protect her husband from his former wife and her magical attempts to turn him into a monkey, says, “Protect him, O Lord, from the guile of women. Indeed, their guile is great [inna kaydahunna ‘azîm].”^[19] By uttering this phrase, with the word kayd (guile), the Christian wife has inserted herself into the centuries-old world of Arabo-Islamic mental structures regarding women.

The twelfth Qur’ânic sûra, the Sûrat Yûsuf, relates the “most beautiful of stories,” that of Joseph and his various adventures, including his problematic relationship with the wife of the ancient Egyptian ruler.^[20] The biblical Joseph is transformed in Islam into a paragon of beauty, and the attempted seduction of him by the ruler’s wife, who is unnamed in the Qur’ân but later acquires the name of Zulaykhâ, has entered the Muslim literary and cultural imagination. The Egyptian ruler, upon ascertaining Joseph’s innocence, declares: “Indeed, your guile is great.”^[21] “Your guile” here is in the feminine plural; in using it, therefore, the ruler addresses the entire female gender.

“Indeed, their guile is great” also refers to a plurality of women and has had an uncanny ability to reappear in the Arabo-Islamic textual corpus, in locations varying from the frame of Thousand and One Nights to contemporary short stories, including one by Najîb Mahfûz.^[22]

That this phrase should then surface in a recent Egyptian novel is perhaps unremarkable. Once again, however, Nawal El Saadawi has redefined the debate. In its “original” Qur’ânic form, the phrase referring to the great guile of women is uttered by a male, hence delineating a male-female gender distinction. In the Saadawian vehicle, however, a woman joins the ranks of men to pass this judgment on her own kind. The Christian wife of the Imam is there to remind the reader of patriarchy’s great attraction.

It is not just the Muslim holy book, however, that inspires the characters in The Fall of the Imam to recast the centuries-long Arabo-Islamic textual tradition. Material from the hadîth makes an appearance as well. Bint Allâh reveals to the Chief of Security that her brother, Fadl Allâh, sacrificed himself for his country: “I fought with him in a single trench and I saw him with my own eyes while he was fighting the enemy.” The Chief of Security replies:

“What did you say? You were with him in a single trench?” She said: “Yes.” He said: “The two of you only?” She said: “Yes.” He said: “That is another crime. Man and woman cannot be together in unlawful seclusion, except that the Devil be their third.”^[23]

Thus, the Chief of Security has put his finger on a societal concern related to mixed male-female company. This concern is articulated in the oft-quoted hadîth that when a man and a woman are together, the Devil is the third.^[24] This means that a heterosexual situation in which the two individuals are not linked by a licit bond such as marriage is potentially explosive—and illicit.

Once again, the Saadawian text questions and redefines. Bint Allâh was fighting in the trench with her brother. Brother and sister are alone. Hamîda and Hamîdû of The Circling Song already demonstrated with their incestuous interlude that the Chief of Security’s concern may not be so far-fetched. And sure enough, in a chapter entitled “Together in the Trench” a third-person narrator describes this run-in between brother and sister in the trench. They hug each other and become glued together as though each wanted to lose him- or herself in the other.^[25] This relationship is clearly problematic. By uttering the hadîth, the Chief of Security has inserted this brother-sister pair into a larger Arabo-Islamic discourse on male-female relations.

Islamic religious materials are reformulated, as are Christian ones. Both these monotheistic religions seem to figure large in the world of the Imam. And to complicate things further, more specifically literary texts from the rich medieval Arabic corpus play a pivotal role in this novel. As the Imam arrives at the gates of Paradise, the angel Ridwân asks him if he has a permit, to which the Imam answers in the negative. He cannot enter Paradise without it, he is told. The Imam waits awhile and then notices a willow tree by the gate. He asks for one of its leaves, which he will then have turned into a permit. But Ridwân refuses, arguing that no leaf can be taken out of Paradise except by permission of His Majesty.^[26]

Is this simply another humorous bisociation (examples of which abound in The Fall of the Imam) between a religious universe and a less religious one? No. In playing with the notion of a permit to enter Paradise, El Saadawi’s narrator—in this case the Imam himself—has entered yet another Arabo-Islamic cultural and textual domain. One of the most famous medieval Arabic treatises is the Epistle of Forgiveness (Risâlat al-Ghufrân) by the blind fifth/eleventh-century Syrian literary figure, Abû al-‘Alâ’ al-Ma‘arrî.^[27] As Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych puts it:

The first part of the Epistle consists of an ironic and satyrical journey to an Arabo-Islamic Parnassus. In it the author places his protagonist, his fellow littérateur, the Aleppan Ibn al-Qârih in the heavenly Garden to discourse and carouse with those of the Arab poets and assorted litterati that have been granted salvation.^[28]

As Ibn al-Qârih approaches the gates of Paradise, Ridwân asks him the same question he asked the Imam in a novel nine centuries later: does he have a permit? The medieval littérateur’s answer is the same as the twentieth-century ruler’s: no. And Ridwân’s response in both instances is likewise identical: there is no way to enter without this permit. Like the Imam, Ibn al-Qârih spots a willow tree and asks for a leaf—a request that meets the same fate as that of the Imam: it is refused.^[29]

There is more than superficial similarity hiding behind these two incidents. The identity in narrative brings with it a similarity in language. The contemporary Saadawian novel and its medieval predecessor, al-Ma‘arrî’s epistle, exploit much the same vocabulary to express identical actions. This intricate feminist game of intertextuality redefines the Imam’s journey as it recasts that of his medieval predecessor, Ibn al-Qârih. El Saadawi’s version, however, takes on an interesting political twist as the Imam’s discussion with Ridwân continues. The contemporary leader speaks of his own well-attended funeral:

The scene was awesome. Did you not see the picture on the cover of Newsweek? Ridwân said: I had not heard of Newsweek until now. I said: If you do not know Newsweek, then you do not know the greats or the Great Powers.^[30]

The difference in registers between the two speakers, the angel Ridwân and the image-conscious Imam, should not be a surprise. After all, the intersection of the religious and the political has been a given in the patriarchal world of Nawal El Saadawi’s Fall of the Imam. But by exploiting the Ma‘arrian literary construct of a journey to Paradise, El Saadawi has foregrounded the clash of the religious and the political, thus adding another dimension to this encounter. Ridwân is not concerned with the Western-generated image of the Middle Eastern political leader. Nor has he advanced much beyond his medieval namesake. As an embodiment of the religious face of patriarchy, he signals that this element has not changed—hence his identical responses to these two seekers of Paradise, medieval and modern.

But al-Ma‘arrî’s text and those of the Qur’ân and the hadîth notwithstanding, the most important intertext in The Fall of the Imam is created by The Thousand and One Nights. The Nights in the Egyptian feminist’s text come predominantly through the royal male character, Shâhriyâr. He is such a powerful patriarchal figure that he can transcend his original locus in The Thousand and One Nights and serve to unify the Imam’s mythical universe with its counterpart, the lands “beyond the sea.”

The Imam’s land, as we have seen, is a place without a name, an unspecified territory that could obviously stand for any or many a Middle Eastern country. One could comfortably place it in Egypt—there are, after all, references to water buffalo. But this would not be what the narrative intends. The text is uncomfortable identifying the “sea” either as the Mediterranean or as the Nile. “They said: the names here differ. Time differs. But the place is one. And the sun is one.”^[31] This society is complete: populated by men, women, and children.

The other geographical locus is also unspecified, but for being “beyond the sea.” We can conclude that it is the West, the place where the Imam’s foreign Christian wife learned political science. It is also the place that creates test-tube babies, and where women give birth to books. This West makes its appearance through the narration of the test-tube man, whose beloved ran off to “the other world,” that of the Imam, and about which he has heard “fairy tales and the stories of The Thousand and One Nights.” He himself is an office employee whose male boss makes sexual overtures to him. The woman he marries has “a warm intellect and a cold womb.” He warms her in the winter, and she keeps him cool in the summer. He will, however, go to the land of the Imam, play the role of philosopher in the ruler’s court, and leave with his beloved.^[32]

When the test-tube man (later to become the Philosopher in the Imam’s world) is filling out forms in the Eastern environment, he is asked his mother’s name. He replies: “I do not know. I am one of the test-tube children.” “And what are test tubes?” he is asked, to which he answers: “They are the new wombs. They produce children innocent of sin, without sex, marriage, or sexual intercourse. Nothing but artificial insemination.” (The high-tech version of the Virgin Birth!)^[33] The Eastern response is one of horror: to his questioners, this is forbidden sexuality that confuses paternity.^[34]

Two distinct geographical loci. Two distinct societies. Each represents the other as a transoceanic land (warâ’ al-bahr, warâ’ al-bihâr).^[35] One is clearly the East, and one, the West. But unlike in Kipling’s verses, East does meet West in the Saadawian narrative, and on many levels. To begin with, there is physical contact between the two societies, not only in the Imam’s relationship with his foreign wife but also through the visit of the test-tube man. Western male fantasies of female control do not differ from Eastern ones; both are channeled—as we shall see momentarily—through an identity with Shâhriyâr, the gynocidal ruler of The Thousand and One Nights. El Saadawi has been accused of praising the West and addressing her fiction to a Western audience.^[36] Would that life were so simple. Unfortunately, in The Fall of the Imam there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only bad guys. The West receives the same harsh treatment as the East. Both loci are turned into dystopian territories, in a unified vision in which male patriarchy has the upper hand.

Certainly, feminist dystopias are not new in women’s literature. But here again, El Saadawi’s vision differs. Can the Imam’s world be stood up next to, for example, the Hitlerian universe portrayed in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night?^[37] A futuristic society based on the Hitlerian superman ideology gone mad, Burdekin’s male society isolates women and relegates them to the role of breeding animals. The woman-as-animal theme is to be found in the Imam’s world as well, where “the price of a female water buffalo in the market is higher than that of a woman. A man owns four women but has only one female water buffalo.”^[38] The words themselves are more eloquent than any commentary.

Nor is El Saadawi’s fictional universe quite the same as that of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s world of Gilead superficially resembles that of the Imam. Gilead, a religiously conservative (if not fundamentalist) society, is a male-oriented world in which women are pushed into the role of non-thinking servants. The handmaids function as breeding animals, their identity becoming tied to the male household of which they form a part.^[39]

When one places The Fall of the Imam alongside Swastika Night and The Handmaid’s Tale, however, essential differences arise. The Western works project certain trends into the future to create a dystopian vision of what could be. El Saadawi’s work takes place in the present, though this is an atemporal present in which one year revolves into the next and in which holidays merge one with the other. The Fall of the Imam does not speak, as The Circling Song did, of an amorphous time, “that time,” which creates a possible alternate narrative reality. Bint Allâh’s time is not the same as that of Hamîda and Hamîdû.

The Fall of the Imam magnifies traits existing in the present and lays bare the fundamental characteristics of society through its mythic discourse. The work displays a cyclical organization: Bint Allâh dies on the first page of the book, as she dies on the last. Herein lies the most important difference between El Saadawi’s novel, on the one hand, and, on the other, Burdekin’s and Atwood’s dystopian works—or even such utopian visions as Burdekin’s The End of This Day’s Business or Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn.^[40] The linear, historical vision of the Western writers, be it utopian or dystopian, is rooted in the Judeo-Christian (or more properly Abrahamic, for that includes Islam) tradition. Present developments lead to different futures, whether darker antifeminist ones or rosier feminist ones. If Nawal El Saadawi’s essentially pagan cyclical vision is pessimistic from one point of view—because the hero Bint Allâh is constantly being killed in a seemingly endless process—it is optimistic from another—because she is just as constantly rising up to struggle again.

Even the treatment of artificial insemination runs counter to contemporary feminist expectations. A world devoid of heterosexual intercourse, a world with some kind of artificial insemination might generally be assumed to signal a feminist utopia rather than a dystopia. After all, do not the women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland propagate themselves through parthenogenesis?^[41] And is not fertilization in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man accomplished by the merger of two ova?^[42] At the hands of the Saadawian narrator, however, artificial insemination becomes a Western procedure discussed in an Eastern setting. It is not a sign of the superiority of the West. Rather, it is commented upon as an aberration, and this commentary transforms what might be a utopian element in the imaginary Western location into a dystopian one.

So, where does Shâhriyâr fit in? And what gives us the right to link East and West under his sign? Nawal El Saadawi could not have chosen her male prototype better. This Shâhriyâr can leap across the ocean, spanning geographical territories, moving from East to West. It is no accident that of all Arabic literature, The Thousand and One Nights is perhaps the one text that can justifiably be said to be as much a part of the Western literary tradition as of the Eastern one. Burton’s translation, Galland’s translation—these are only two of the texts that helped give the Nights a permanent position in world literature.^[43] Hence the appropriateness of Shâhriyâr as a universal male figure.

In The Fall of the Imam, as in the works of many other modern authors, Eastern and Western, male and female, the medieval text appears primarily through its frame. John Barth, Tawfîq al-Hakîm, Ethel Johnston Phelps, and Edgar Allan Poe are but a few of the names that can be cited in this context.^[44]

What do we mean, however, by the “frame” of The Thousand and One Nights? Shâhriyâr, a mythical ruler, longs to see his brother, Shâhzamân. The latter, about to set off to see Shâhriyâr, catches his wife frolicking with a loathsome cook. He kills both, then proceeds to visit his brother. There, he discovers that his brother’s wife is also unfaithful, but her perfidy is with a black slave. He eventually reveals this to his older brother and the two set out on a spiritual journey, abandoning the world. On this voyage, they are lured into sexual intercourse by an ‘ifrît’s young woman who was locked up by this creature who kidnapped her on her wedding night. After this sexual interlude, Shâhriyâr returns to his kingdom, has his wife and her black lover disposed of, and begins his series of one-night stands with virgins, whom he kills after the evening’s entertainment. Shahrazâd enters the scene at this point and, with her sister’s help, recounts stories that conveniently stretch past the break of day, keeping the king in suspense and herself alive. At the end of the storytelling cycle, we learn that she has given birth to three sons. The monarch lets her live and has her stories engraved for posterity. Her sister weds Shâhzamân, and the four live happily ever after.^[45]

The narrative concentration on Shâhriyâr in the contemporary Egyptian feminist’s text is suggestive. What a grim view we get of the male hero as he is transformed into the royal serial murderer! The test-tube man confesses to having heard “the stories of The Thousand and One Nights.”^[46] When his psychiatrist recommends travel, the test-tube man tells his wife that he is going to “the other world.” After leaving her, he looks in the mirror and sees himself as “King Shâhriyâr. I will rape a virgin every night, and before dawn I will kill her before she kills me.”^[47] This last phrase expresses it well: male aggression against the female is reinterpreted as self-protection. We have already redefined the emotion underlying Shâhriyâr’s relationship to his ex-virginal victims: fear of the female.

The test-tube man’s identification with Shâhriyâr remains fairly superficial, maintained in the realm of the imaginary. The identification between Shâhriyâr and the Imam is more direct, more violent. In his own first-person narration, the Imam reveals that when in bed he loved reading books from the turâth (the cultural and literary heritage of the Arabs), especially The Thousand and One Nights.^[48] He would put on his reading glasses and take off the Imam’s face. Looking in the mirror, he would watch as physical changes—white skin and white teeth—transformed him into Shâhriyâr. “My heart is white like his heart, loving black slave girls. And my soul is innocent like his, not knowing that a woman can love a man other than her husband.”

The Imam’s body shivers when he sees Shâhriyâr’s wife in bed with the black slave, “and in my dreams I see my wife in bed with one of my black slaves.” He opens his eyes and instead sees his wife in bed hugging a book. Reassured, he runs to his black slave girl, stopping on the way under a tree. He enjoys being without his guards, in complete anonymity. But what does he see? A giant whom he takes to be either a jinni or one of his enemies from the opposition political party. He quickly climbs the tree, as he did when he was a child, and hides in the branches. The giant sits under the tree, opening a box with multiple locks. Inside this box is another box, from which the giant takes out a woman of bewitching beauty; he lays his head on her lap and falls asleep. The young woman spots the man in the tree and calls out to him to descend; he does, and she proceeds to have sexual intercourse with him.

Then follows a Thousand and One Nights–like conversation about the men’s rings this woman has collected from previous, similar sexual interludes, including the reference to adding the ring of this most recent male to the others. The Imam/Shâhriyâr runs back to the castle, only to find his wife in bed with her lover. He kills the two “just as Shâhriyâr had done” and adds to this singular gynocide that of his other wives.

Thereafter, every month at the new moon, he marries a virgin, deflowers her, and kills her the same night. This he does for twenty years, until the people object and the young women flee. So he requests from his Chief of Security a virgin, whose description he reads to the Chief of Security from the turâth books. The Chief of Security is flabbergasted and begins to believe in reincarnation, saying to himself: “This is King Shâhriyâr’s soul inhabiting the body of the Imam, or it is the Imam’s soul inhabiting King Shâhriyâr’s body.” After a protracted discussion with the Imam, during which the Great Writer is also called in to discuss love, the Chief of Security goes out to search for this young girl.^[49] The girl turns out to be Bint Allâh, and at this point in the narrative it is no longer Shâhriyâr whose saga is in question but the Imam’s. The bloodthirsty medieval ruler disappears now that he has fulfilled his role. Nevertheless, the complex relationship that then develops between the Imam and Bint Allâh picks up elements of the fantastic that, as we shall see, bring it close in spirit to some of the stories in the Nights.

Shâhriyâr provides an effective and potent model for the Imam’s gynocidal instincts. Unlike the test-tube man, who only imagined himself to be the medieval Islamic ruler, the Imam becomes that ruler. The book that he is reading is transposed into the reality that he then lives. The Saadawian narrative becomes like a camera lens moving constantly from the world of one ruler to that of the other. When the Imam spots the giant, whom we know to be a character from the frame of The Thousand and One Nights, he takes him to be either a jinni or one of his enemies from the opposition party. By this mere thought, he brings the two worlds together. When he kills his wife, he does it “as Shâhriyâr had done.”^[50]

The differences between the subsequent behavior of the two rulers are perhaps as telling as the similarities. The sexual interlude between the Imam and the giant’s mate takes place at an altogether different point in the ruler’s adventure than does that between Shâhriyâr and the ‘ifrît’s young woman. The Imam encounters this sexually aggressive woman as he himself is on his way to his black slave girl. When he checks on his wife, it is to discover that she is sleeping alone, hugging a book. Only after his own seduction does he discover his wife in bed with her lover. This reshuffling of events shifts attention to the ruler’s sexual behavior. It is his setting out to see his black slave girl that unleashes the unfortunate events, and not his wife’s illicit conduct, as in the original Nights. El Saadawi’s text has deftly overturned the frame of The Thousand and One Nights, even going so far as to have the modern male ruler frolic with a black slave girl, when in the original it was the medieval rulers’ wives who had strayed, one of them with a black male slave.^[51]

When the Saadawian text alludes to the Imam’s killing his earlier, older wives,^[52] it makes an indirect commentary on the original Shâhriyâr’s monogamy: the medieval narrator, after all, speaks of only one wife, the unnamed perfidious female. Does this monogamy make the wife’s act that much more inexcusable? It might, since the reader could then assume that she did not share her husband’s sexual favors with other wives.^[53] Whereas Shâhriyâr performs his murderous exploits on a daily basis, his modern-day follower transposes the act into a monthly one, performed at the time of the new moon. The Muslim calendar is, of course, a lunar one; when the killing cycle becomes monthly, the deflowering and murder of the virgin by the Imam is turned into a quasi-sacrificial act, opposed to the daily avenging act of his medieval predecessor.

The Chief of Security may be correct in reincarnating King Shâhriyâr and playing musical bodies with the souls of the two governing murderers. But let us not underestimate the constant tension, created by El Saadawi’s recasting of the frame, between the past that is Shâhriyâr and the present that is the Imam.

And what better place for this tension to be embodied than in the woman? Where has Shahrazâd gone in this modern narrative? Cherchez la femme becomes a dictum as important for us as it is for the Imam’s Chief of Security. The Shahrazâd of The Thousand and One Nights is occulted. The name Shahrazâd does appear once in The Fall of the Imam. Bint Allâh, in a chapter she narrates, speaks of an old grandmother who would tell the children stories. Her stories merged one into another, her voice never stopping—“as though the cutting off of the story meant the cutting off of her life, like Shahrazâd.” To the question “Who is Shahrazâd?” the old grandmother, rather than answering, would simply begin her narration anew.^[54] This allusion to narration as a lifesaving device is familiar to readers of the Nights. In fact, it forms an essential part of a certain analytical approach to the text.^[55]

From a major character, the medieval teller of stories is transformed into a mysterious, shadowy figure. Her fortuitous appearance in El Saadawi’s text does serve a function, though. She is a literary herald of sorts who signals to us, the readers, that intricate intertextual games are about to unfold. Then she can comfortably disappear, leaving the frame to her male counterhero, the ruler.^[56]

How can this Shahrazâd be so passive, so invisible, we might well ask, given that we are dealing with a feminist text? Simple. In the frame of the Nights, Shahrazâd enters the scene as a woman in control. She has read books, she has memorized poetry, she is knowledgeable, intelligent, wise, an adîba (a woman learned in the arts of literature and society).^[57] She is also independent, defying her father’s advice not to venture into the monarch’s bed, and above all, she is crafty, saving herself and her female kind. Nawal El Saadawi’s novelistic agenda is radically different. Here, man is in control. It is man’s murderous acts that chase the women from the kingdom. It is man who orders that the virgin be searched out. It is man who determines the characteristics that she will have, guided by descriptions in his cultural and literary heritage.

More significantly, the Shahrazâd of The Thousand and One Nights performs a critical role in changing the dynamics of male-female sexual relations, in redefining sexual politics. When she consciously takes on her shoulders the burden of saving womankind from the royal serial murderer, she has accepted an arduous task: that of educating this ruler in the ways of a nonproblematic heterosexual relationship. The Shâhriyâr of the Nights, after all, has thus far come in contact only with perfidious females. Shahrazâd’s self-instigated entry into the narrative changes all that.^[58]

The Imam’s path is different. When he orders his Chief of Security to look for a virgin, it is not to alter his behavior. No single woman will save him from the collective perfidy of the female gender. His Shahrazâd does not exist. In effect, she has been replaced by Bint Allâh, a very different figure indeed, and one who conforms more closely to the description Fatima Mernissi incorrectly ascribed to Shahrazâd: “an innocent young girl whom a fatal destiny has brought into Chahrayar’s bed.”^[59] The substitution of Bint Allâh for Shahrazâd is appropriate to El Saadawi’s cyclical vision. The original Shahrazâd worked in a linear frame and effected a solution, one that recuperated criticism and ultimately sanctioned the patriarchal order.^[60] El Saadawi’s universe shows no such resolution: the struggle between Bint Allâh and the Imam goes on.

What is true for the Imam is also the case for his geographical cousin, the test-tube man. The two males are united by a common merger of personality with Shâhriyâr. Both fuse identities with the medieval serial murderer by looking into a mirror: an instrument of reflection. Both will sacrifice virgins at the altar of their male fear, eloquently expressed by the Western protagonist. Both have also shared the same woman, who is the beloved of the test-tube man and the wife of the Imam. In a sense, these two males are like the two brothers from the medieval frame, who have also shared the same woman, the ‘ifrît’s mate. East and West have once again met, this time through male identity and sympathy with the murderous principle of gynocide. Shâhriyâr survives not only the test of time but also that of place. Politics may vary, places may vary, but sexual politics, we are told, do not.

Shâhriyâr may bring the two patriarchal systems of the East and the West together, but as a model he still remains more effective in the East, the world of the Imam. His roots are Arabo-Islamic and will remain so. His adventures are part and parcel of the Arabo-Islamic heritage, affectionately and proudly called the turâth. The chapter in which the Imam is metamorphosed into Shâhriyâr is appropriately titled “The Revivification of the Heritage” (Ihyâ’ al-Turâth). And when this very same Imam talks about his bedtime reading, it is his passion for the kutub al-turâth (the books of the turâth) that he singles out.^[61]

The turâth is, of course, centuries old, a complex and enormous collection of texts ranging from the literary through the historical to the theological and philosophical. There is in the Saadawian fictional universe an intimate relationship between men and this rich textual tradition. They can exploit it, as the Imam does; they can cite it. They are clearly at home with it. More important, they often use it in a delicate gender game. The search for the virgin, the ideal woman described in the turâth, is perhaps the least ambiguous example. She is described in the turâth, but she herself is not familiar with it. When the Imam asks Bint Allâh whether she has read the turâth books, she answers in the negative. What about The Thousand and One Nights? The answer is the same.^[62]

Not surprisingly, the identical situation occurs with the Imam’s Christian wife. When he confesses to her that he fears coming back and finding her in bed with the Body Guard, à la Shâhriyâr, she asks: “Who is Shâhriyâr?” He responds: “Do you not know Shâhriyâr?” to which she answers: “No.” To the further question of whether she has read the turâth books, she again responds in the negative. This is a shortcoming in her breeding, she is told; she must read.^[63] Lest we be tempted to excuse this lack of knowledge by the fact that this woman is not of the East, the test-tube man is there to argue the contrary. He, a male, is, as we have seen, perfectly cognizant of Shâhriyâr, even going so far as to identify with the murderous ruler.

In a sense, Bint Allâh is more fortunate than the Imam’s wife, if only because she is told who Shâhriyâr is: “King Shâhriyâr, whose wife, white like honey, betrayed him with a black slave.” This betrayal becomes an obsession in the mind of the Imam/Shâhriyâr, and his own parallel betrayal with the black slave girl seems almost irrelevant. This is what the old grandmother meant when she called man’s actions a “lawful perfidy.”^[64] We have come full circle.

But what a far cry this modern Egyptian pseudo-Shahrazâd is from her literary predecessor! The twentieth-century Arabic hero is a player in a literary game in which she ignores the identity of the other players. Unlike her ancestor, whose appearance in the text is triumphally heralded with her in-depth literary and historical knowledge, Bint Allâh is particularly vulnerable. It is not her knowledge that is exposed, but her ignorance.

Bint Allâh will pay dearly for this ignorance. Her intimate encounter with the Imam demonstrates her distance from her medieval ancestor. As the contemporary Imam meets the equally contemporary Bint Allâh, his fate parts ways with that of the medieval Shâhriyâr. The Chief of Security looks through the keyhole and sees Bint Allâh spraying the Imam with water and ordering him to turn into a sheep. This he does, and spends the night bleating. Before sunrise, she reverses the operation and turns him back into the Imam. The security chief trembles as he watches this reversal, realizing that she is able to perform magic, “like the women in the turâth books.”^[65] The reader acquainted with The Thousand and One Nights realizes that the Chief of Security is, of course, right. Other women in that text preceded Bint Allâh in transforming humans into animals.^[66]

But Bint Allâh is not just any woman. In this instance, she is paradigmatically playing the role of Shahrazâd. Instead of the narrative role of her predecessor, however, hers is imbued with magic as she transforms the male ruler into a docile animal. She makes her reasons clear before undertaking this act: either she will live or she will sacrifice herself to the daughters of the nation and liberate them from the male ruler. The option that Shahrazâd had does not seem to be available to this contemporary hero—an unremarkable fact, perhaps, given Shahrazâd’s occultation from the feminist novel.

The powerful encounter between the Imam and Bint Allâh transforms both characters. The Imam, himself consumed by desire, in turn corporally consumes Bint Allâh. He sucks her bones as she hands them to him one by one. Despite his insatiability, his body inflates with what he eats and bursts. Bint Allâh, eyes wide with surprise, watches his face fall to the ground; she then takes off like a gazelle, her dog at her heels.^[67]

This violent cannibalistic interlude is far from innocent.^[68] As the Imam consumes Bint Allâh, he destroys himself. Seen another way, the patriarch attempts to annihilate the female by incorporating her within himself, but in the process he self-destructs. The third-person narrator of this episode could not have devised a better way to express the struggle between patriarchy and the female gender. The entire episode functions as a powerful mise-en-abîme.

As Bint Allâh sits with the Imam preceding this event, the narrator describes the ruler holding a glass of wine and sitting on a Persian carpet into which is woven a picture of the Ka‘ba. His elbow is making a dent in the holy shrine, and, the glass of wine shaking in his hand, some of the wine lands in that dent. The narrator does not let the situation rest, however. As the conversation with Bint Allâh becomes more heated, the glass in the Imam’s hand shakes even more, and its entire contents spill, “drowning the sacred enclosure, the Ka‘ba, and the Prophet’s tomb.”^[69]

The unidentified narrator is being highly provocative here. The Imam’s drinking of the illicit liquid (alcohol is forbidden in Islam) calls attention to his superficial religiosity. But consuming this liquid on a rug displaying the Ka‘ba is downright sacrilegious.^[70]

Perhaps this narrator is, like the female hero being described, ignorant of the religious and literary tradition. Bint Allâh plays the role of kingpin in the Saadawian game of religious intertextuality and redefinition of the turâth despite her perceived ignorance of the male-defined turâth. She is the first speaker in The Fall of the Imam, the first voice the reader encounters:

The Night of the Big Feast. After the long pursuit and before the rise of dawn, one of them hit me from behind. I was running in the dark looking for my mother, and I had no one with me but my dog.^[71]

So far, so good: we have a chase, a victim and her dog, and a set of events that take place during a religious holiday. Soon enough, though, this chase and this victim with her ubiquitous dog are redefined. A third-person narrator tells us in the next chapter that the crime took place in the dark. The victim, it turns out, remained alive,

in the form of a stone in the belly of the earth. Year after year. She remained living in the form of a stone, and beside her was her dog. The live body turned into stone. (This is a scientific fact. In history, the People of the Cave lived with their dog in the belly of the earth for three hundred years.)^[72]

With one quick parenthetical remark, Bint Allâh and her canine companion have been transformed. From a modern-day victim pursued by the police system of an unjust ruler, the girl and her faithful dog are cast into the wider religious universe of the People of the Cave.

The People of the Cave (Ahl al-Kahf, known also as the Ashâb al-Kahf) are the legendary Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. They, along with their dog, attempted to escape the anti-Christian persecutions of the Emperor Decius by hiding in a cave where they slept for over three hundred years.^[73] The tale is in the Qur’ân, in a sûra named, appropriately enough, Sûrat al-Kahf.^[74]

Why the People of the Cave? François Jourdan, in a comparative study of the tale of the Seven Sleepers, explains that this legend—central to which is the notion of resurrection—is equally important for Christianity as for Islam.^[75] In a version of the tale told by the medieval writer al-Tha‘labî in his Stories of the Prophets (Qisas al-Anbiyâ’), the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin, ‘Alî ibn Abî Tâlib, is the storyteller; he relates the adventures of the Sleepers in response to an inquiry by a Jew who says that he will convert to Islam if he finds the account true to that in his own tradition. When the Sleepers awake, they find themselves in a kingdom ruled by two kings, one a Muslim and one a Christian.^[76]

In The Fall of the Imam, where both these monotheistic religions coexist and conversion plays a role, no better legend could be found to encapsulate the story. The Christian wife of the Imam wavers between Christianity and Islam. When praying for the safety of her Muslim husband, she first makes the sign of the cross and then recites: “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Protect him from his enemies, O our Virgin Mother. I seek God’s forgiveness. Protect him O God and O Prophet.”^[77] This Christian convert to Islam seems unable to keep her religions straight. The heaven to which the Imam goes is also inhabited by Christians.^[78] What we do not see in The Fall is a battle between Christian and Muslim, like that which takes place between the two rulers in the medieval variant of the legend. There, the Christian ruler claims that the Sleepers died Christians, whereas the Muslim claims that they died Muslims. The question is, what is to be built at the door of the cave, a mosque or a church? The Muslim wins, and a mosque is built. El Saadawi’s religious universe, however, is not so clear-cut.

In The Fall, it is the very same Christian wife who reverses the religious gender expectations in the text. No sooner does she invoke the Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Ghost than she asks God’s forgiveness and invokes the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.^[79] Is nothing sacred, the reader might well ask. The confrontation of these two trinities, one female and one male, has its uses, however. It facilitates the confrontation of Bint Allâh and the People of the Cave.

Gender differences aside, Bint Allâh is a lone figure. Her trajectory does not reflect the semicommunal solidarity of the People of the Cave. Nor are their fates the same: although both she and her male legendary predecessors are pursued by a tyrant during a holiday, the males escape, falling into a centuries-long slumber, whereas she is actually killed. The collective nature of her murder and its semiritualistic aspects bring her closer to the sort of figure René Girard calls “a scapegoat.”^[80] The mortal threat that propels the Sleepers’ escape never materializes, as they safely find a refuge. Yet their sleep redefines Bint Allâh’s death, which itself is but a temporary state in the narrative. Resurrection is always around the corner for her, as it is for the People of the Cave.

For both female and male victims, the resurrection is also a rebirth of sorts. The cave is but a metaphor for the womb, and Bint Allâh was transformed into stone in “the belly of the earth.” The Saadawian narrator takes great care to conflate the two events by applying the same terminology to the People of the Cave.^[81]

Yet despite resurrection and the invocation of the Christian and Muslim Abrahamic religious traditions, El Saadawi’s vision is essentially cyclical and pagan. The saga of the Sleepers of Ephesus is reasonably straightforward: they escape, they sleep, and they are resurrected. Theirs is a linear trajectory. Bint Allâh’s path breaks with theirs here. She does not escape, she is killed, and she is resurrected only to be caught again, to be killed again, and to be resurrected again—and on and on. And it is this cyclical aspect that also differentiates Bint Allâh’s sacrifice from that of Abraham’s son, Ismâ‘îl, also mentioned in The Fall of the Imam.^[82] Tempting though it might be to turn her into this dutiful son, she is actually closer to the sheep whose slaughter no one can or will stop.

In the same way that El Saadawi parted ways with the feminist dystopias and their linear historical visions, so does she diverge from the Abrahamic religions. Her narrators are not exclusively monotheistic in their exploitation of monotheistic religious elements. When, after one of her numerous killings, Bint Allâh is buried, her heart continues to beat for three days following her death. For seven days, her soul continues to hover over the grave.^[83] The Christian element here is clear: the three days in the grave during which Bint Allâh’s heart continues to beat parallel the three days Jesus is in the tomb prior to his resurrection. The soul’s hovering, however, evokes a different tradition: the pre-Islamic notion that the souls of those whose blood has not been avenged would linger around their grave, turning into owls not to be silenced until vengeance was complete.^[84]

Bint Allâh herself, like her soul, hovers between the various religious traditions. During a religious lesson in the Bayt al-Atfâl, she listens to the teacher reciting Qur’ânic verses from the Sûrat al-Falaq:

Say: “I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak
from the evil of what He has created,
from the evil of darkness when it gathers,
from the evil of the women who blow on knots.”^[85]

Bint Allâh closes her eyes and sleeps and sees the women who are blowing (al-naffâthât), looking like black eagles soaring in the air. She then awakes to the voice of the teacher, coming through like the roar of a jet plane (al-naffâtha).^[86]

The naffâthât in the Qur’ânic text are female sorcerers who would spit on knots while uttering certain words.^[87] From the most sacred of Muslim texts, Bint Allâh moves to eagles and thence to jet planes, creating a bisociation (more correctly a trisociation) that exploits the gap between traditional and modern. (A similar bisociation occurs in a discussion between the Great Writer and the Leader of the Opposition. After the Imam makes a query—namely, whether a link exists between Judgment Day and atomic radiation—the two vie with each other in debate, citing the Qur’ân.)^[88] The reference to female sorcerers (witches, if one wishes) is hardly insignificant: they were, after all, religious competitors of the male Prophet. At the same time, this citation is one that more religiously oriented contemporary Arabic readers sometimes ask about. One of the most popular genres in Islamist discourse today is the legal injunction, the fatwâ. A sort of religious “Dear Abby” column, the fatwâ involves a question posed to a religious authority who then provides an answer based on Islamic law and theology. Thus it is that Mûsâ Sâlih Sharaf, in his collection of contemporary fatwâs on women, responds to a query from a Moroccan man about the meaning of the Qur’ânic quote “and from the evil of the women who blow on knots.” This query provides the male religious authority with the opportunity not only to explain the full import of the verse, but also to educate his reader on the negative role of magic in Islam.^[89]

But in the Saadawian young woman’s religious lesson, however, the sûra remains incomplete. The last verse is missing. Only when the Christian wife of the Imam is praying for the safety of her powerful husband does the missing thematic element appear. She prays: “Protect him O Lord from his enemies. From the envious males [al-hâsidîn] and the envious females [al-hâsidât]. From the evil of the women who blow on knots.”^[90] Though not a Qur’ânic citation, the prayer of the Christian wife nevertheless plays an uncanny game with the sacred text, the reference to “the women who blow on knots” being its most obvious tie to the incomplete sûra. The missing last verse of the Sûrat al-Falaq reads: “from the evil of the envier [hâsid] when he envies.”^[91] Though the missing verse is not truly restored, its thematic core, “the evil of the envier,” is effectively supplied by this Christian convert to Islam, whose garbled religiosity seems essential to the completion of the Qur’ânic text.

True, the wife of the Imam has used the occulted thematic element from the sûra, but she has reversed the order of the material. After all, in the Qur’ânic text, the female sorcerers preceded the envious. Is this simply an aberration, without significance? Or is it something more symptomatic of women’s relationship to the religious textual tradition?

Bint Allâh fell asleep during the religious lesson. Is it any wonder, then, that she is in no position to defend herself when she confronts the Leader of the Official Opposition? In an interchange, she reveals to him that she is without mother or father. “No father?” he asks in confusion. She answers: “Yes.” He says: “This is a calamity from God. We try you with evil and good for a testing,” citing part of a verse from the Sûrat al-Anbiyâ’.^[92] When he discovers that Bint Allâh does not know the verse, he enjoins her to memorize it. He then writes the verse on a piece of paper, in the process reversing the two words evil and good. She thus memorizes the wrong verse, and when she is heard reciting it, she is confronted with her misknowledge. She reveals the source of the mangling, but to no avail: the Leader of the Official Opposition denies having generated the incorrect verse. The punishment? Her tongue is to be cut out.^[93] What a savage commentary on the official uses of religion! Good and evil are reversed. Normal assumptions are overturned, and once again it is those in control of discourse who define good and evil.

But perhaps redefining the parameters of the sacred is the domain of the male. As the Great Writer is chastising his mother for her inability to stand up to her unfaithful husband, he quotes the religion teacher who “would recite the words of God, saying: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, treachery for treachery, fidelity for fidelity.”^[94] The Sûrat al-Mâ’ida, which lays out these equivalencies, in fact has nothing on treachery or fidelity. Simply, the Saadawian male transmitters of the sacred traditions have no qualms expanding the semantic range of a given religious dictum, even going so far as to reverse it if necessary. In berating his mother, the Great Writer is not unlike the narrator of El Saadawi’s short story “Death of an Ex-Minister” (Mawt Ma‘âlî al-Wazîr Sâbiqan), who also feels that his mother should have had the courage to stand up to the father.^[95] The presence of the political figure, the ex-minister, reminds the reader of El Saadawi’s corpus that the structures of patriarchy transcend the individual and cover the political as well as the religious.

The intertextual use—and even misuse—of religious material is not an innovation of El Saadawi’s. It formed part and parcel of medieval Arabic anecdotal texts. But in the medieval context, the individuals who indulged in this practice were generally quite learned in the tradition with which they played, and their exploitation of it was invariably ludic.

To take but one example: the religious traditionist and litterateur al-Khatîb al-Baghdâdî (d. 463/1071) tells us in his Book of Misers that a bedouin came to visit a man who had a platter of figs in front of him. Spotting the visitor, the man covered the platter with his garment. The bedouin noticed this but sat down nevertheless. Asked if he knew something from the Qur’ân, the bedouin recited: “By the olive and the Mount Sinai.” The man asked where the fig was, to which the guest replied, “Under your garment.”^[96] What the bedouin has done here is eliminate part of the Qur’ânic text, which, recited properly, should be: “By the fig and the olive and the Mount Sinai.”^[97]

The ludic is alien to the world of Bint Allâh. She is outside the tradition, outside the mainstream of knowledge, which remains locked up in the patriarchal hands of the Imam and his coterie of male followers. This makes of Bint Allâh a modern hero. She also differs greatly from her female ancestors in the medieval Arabic narrative world, where women were at home with the religious textual tradition and could exploit and manipulate it at will.^[98]

With these gender-oriented intertextual games in The Fall of the Imam, El Saadawi has expanded the literary horizons of the contemporary Arabic novel. For the last two decades or more, Arabic writers have been experimenting with extremely interesting and provocative metafictional forms. At issue is the definition of modern Arabic prose and its relationship to its textual ancestors. The name most clearly linked to this indigenous wave in the novel is that of the Egyptian Jamâl al-Ghîtânî, by now an internationally recognized author. His literary games involve overt exploitation of the classical textual tradition, ranging from the mystical through the biographical to the historical. Al-Ghîtânî’s great innovation has been to associate with Mamlûk and other premodern settings the appropriate prose styles, language, and formal compositional features of the texts of the period in question, to tell essentially modern stories.^[99] His compatriot Muhammad Mustajâb, on the other hand, winner of Egypt’s State Prize in Literature, mocks the entire classical onomastic and lexicographical tradition when, in his novel From the Secret History of Nu‘mân ‘Abd al-Hâfiz (Min al-Ta’rîkh al-Sirrî li-Nu‘mân ‘Abd al-Hâfiz), he carefully indicates to the reader how the name of his character should be pronounced—but in dialect.^[100]

Not restricted to Egypt, these intricate intertextual games have appeared in fiction ranging from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. The Palestinian Emile Habiby sets his novel Ikhtayyi in a completely different context by opening it with a text from the historical and literary compendium The Prairies of Gold (Murûj al-Dhahab), by the tenth-century polymath al-Mas‘ûdî.^[101] The Tunisian Mahmûd al-Mis‘adî performs a literary tour de force in his novel Abû Hurayra Related Saying (Haddatha Abû Hurayra Qâl).^[102] Abû Hurayra was one of the famous companions of the Prophet and a hadîth transmitter; and in this instance, the very title of the book exploits the narrative structure of the hadîth.

Names can be multiplied, examples from the literary heritage expanded. Najîb Mahfûz, for example, puts the medieval Arabic picaresque hero Abû al-Fath al-Iskandarî to highly original use in his story cycle “I Saw as the Dreamer Sees” (Ra’aytu fîmâ Yarâ al-Nâ’im). Abû al-Fath appears in the Mahfûzian oneiric universe alongside the wise fool Juhâ and the prophet al-Khidr.^[103]

Multiply though we might and expand though we might, rare would be the Arabic woman writer who—like Nawal El Saadawi—dares to break rank with the other women writers and join the male line-up in playing intertextual games with the literary and religious heritage. The Algerian Francophone novelist and film director Assia Djebar, for instance, has composed a novel that exploits early Islamic accounts, but although her vision is contemporary, her project remains anchored in the historical universe of early Islam. In addition, the transposition into French sidesteps the linguistic violations of the original sources that El Saadawi effects so deftly.^[104]

Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam does not favor one monotheistic tradition over another. Instead, the tendency is toward amalgamation. In some of its Muslim versions, as we saw, the People of the Cave story evokes Judaism as well as Christianity. In El Saadawi’s text, the old church where the Virgin Mary is sighted is close to the mosque.^[105] And is it mere coincidence that Ephesus, the legendary city of our Sleepers, is one of the locations where pagan cults were replaced by Christian ones specifically related to the Virgin Mary?^[106] The Sûrat al-Falaq, al-Qurtubî (d. 671/1272) tells us, was one of three sûras (one of the others being the Sûrat al-Ikhlâs) with which the Prophet asked God’s protection from Jewish magic.^[107] And the verses from the Sûrat al-Ikhlâs relating to God’s begetting and being begotten have generally been considered a refutation of the Christian notion of the Incarnation.^[108]

If Islam and Christianity take the foreground, Judaism is present by implication. Nawal El Saadawi challenges the patriarchal tradition common to all three Abrahamic religions, but is not afraid to exploit it. After all, were it not for Allâh, there would be no Bint Allâh.

Notes

EI² refers to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–).