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In April 2013, Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt published through their own publishing company, Yatakhalayoon, their sf/romance novel HWJN. Its simultaneous publication in English and its coauthors’ enthusiastic promotion of the book led to its Arabic edition becoming a best-seller in their native Saudi Arabia. (A Twitter user posted a picture of the catalog of Jarir Bookstore, Saudi Arabia’s largest, for November/December 2013, wherein HWJN was listed as the number 3 best-seller <t.co/VQesIfMRia>.) Its English edition developed some traction as well, especially after Bahjatt appeared at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio in August 2013, netting among other things a positive Amazon review for HWJN from author Gregory Benford, who said, “This is cultural communication well done” <www.amazon.com/review/R2CSTJNH7NISDJ>.
In early December, Bahjatt began posting on social media that the Saudi religious police, known colloquially as the hay’a or “group” and in English as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, had entered bookshops and demanded that HWJN be taken off the shelves. The book does, after all, concern a (chaste) romance between a human and a jinn, a relationship partially mediated through the use of Ouija boards. Abbas’s statement on Twitter strongly implies that his work has been accused of promoting not only sorcery and deviance but also mumārasāt shirkiya, “polytheistic practices,” a very grave offense in Saudi Arabia <bit.ly/LBUt06>. SF fans and civil libertarians expressed outrage, even in the face of one commenter deriding HWJN as an “Arabic Twilight”; the story circulated all the way up to BoingBoing and Reddit, driving up sales. Yet by the end of December, the novel was once again readily available in Saudi bookstores.
The presentation of interspecies romance in HWJN is problematic only to the hypervigilant: the Ouija board quickly gives way to an iPad, and the jinn protagonist Hawjan remains a Muslim and in fact risks his life in order to combat sorcery, deviance, and polytheistic practices. (In written Arabic, unstressed vowels are not marked as letters, hence the novel’s title is the name of the jinn.) The romance remains chaste and both Hawjan and the human woman Sawsan end up in legitimate marriages to their own kind. But running through HWJN is a sustained, if disguised, critique of the Saudi state; the novel has a level of political engagement absent from the average teen paranormal romance. If anyone in Saudi Arabia should be concerned about HWJN, it’s not the religious but rather the secular authorities.
Abbas and Bahjatt have at the same time presented us with a deeply patronizing view of women, one retrograde even by the standards of works such as Twilight: the treatment of female characters in HWJN detracts from it both as a work of sf and of political criticism.
Cognitive Estrangement and the Human Plural
HWJN, though containing many elements of fantasy, is recognizably science fiction: it presents its novum, the presence of the jinn and their world, as resolutely cognitive, and this novum produces an estrangement that is reflective (cf. Suvin 63–65, 6–8). The text provides multiple explanations of the jinn as natural beings. Hawjan begins his narrative by arguing this very point: “We do not differ much from you” (2). Later, once he and Sawsan become close, he explains his existence:
Life has so many intertwined dimensions and layers on top of each other, the smallest of which is your world. Yes, with everything—all the planets, stars and galaxies! You call it the material world ... but it’s followed by other layers that engulf your world with other worlds you do not feel: our worlds, the world of the Angels, and the worlds of the spirit.... This is called a multidimensional theory. I watched some of your documentaries on that with Sawsan, and you came close to solving the mystery through the membrane theory. (65)
This is not hard sf: Hawjan doesn’t explain membrane theory, nor does he provide a cognitively based explanation for the more outlandish of the seemingly supernatural powers possessed by some of the jinn. But there’s a clear implication throughout the text that the power to manifest in the material world, which Hawjan has and his enemies do not, has a cognitive basis; for example, it is heritable and it can be improved through practice.
There exists a taxonomy of jinn; Hawjan uses words common in classical literature and theology to describe them. A nafar is a Muslim jinn; an efreet is one who can manifest in the material world; a marid is a malevolent jinn. Hawjan has a squabbling family and needs to earn a living. He does not differ that much from us, in that his kind and their society make sense, even if HWJN doesn’t explain all the details.
We can see this not only in the presentation of jinn society, but in the grammar of the Arabic text, as well. A common mnemonic in introductory courses in standard Arabic is that “non-human plural is feminine singular,” because only nouns representing human beings can use the plural inflections for adjectives and verbs. But this is an oversimplification: the actual rule is that only beings that are `āqil can be fully plural. `Āqil literally means “rational, thinking, possessing of intellect” (Cowan 737–38). and includes orders of beings such as angels and jinn. The Arabic text of HWJN has Hawjan referring to jinn in the full plural, thus encapsulating his kind as fundamentally rational: their powers might seem supernatural, but in fact are subject to reason.
In order to save the day, Hawjan must take possession of Sawsan’s human suitor, Eyad, also a medical student:
What happens during possession is simply domination of the control centers in the Human brain in a slight absence of the spirit. You practice such domination amongst your selves [sic] through what you call hypnosis.... most possessions are just schizophrenia cases.... For a person to get possessed, first he must be in a state between consciousness and unconsciousness ... then the Jinni must be flexible in dealing with the Human brain, which is not an easy matter. (114–15)
In Arabic, the word for “crazy” is majnūn, which is the passive participle of the verb janna; a mentally ill person has literally been “jinned” (Cowan 164). Stigmatizing the mentally ill and attributing their symptoms to possession is by no means unique to Arabic culture, but the text of HWJN performs a double service in the cause of cognition first by separating possession from genuine mental illness, then by providing a cognitive explanation for possession. Eyad, whose cheerful acceptance of the existence of the jinn and enthusiastic participation in the project to rescue Sawsan are among HWJN’s best moments, later prepares himself for possession at a critical instant: “I haven’t slept in the past twenty-four hours, and I haven’t eaten anything. I’ve been possessed by a Jinni twice, and I’ve swallowed four Tramadol, four Tegretol, and three Red Bulls. I think I am pretty much ready” (138–39). He’s used his medical knowledge to put his mind and body in the ideal state for Hawjan to take control.
Again, the novel isn’t hard sf: sorcery and magic exist, and divine power trumps all. But the sorcery is portrayed as malevolent and foreign—the sorcerer himself is a black African, not a Saudi—and its need and use is cognitively based. The Marids arrayed against Hawjan cannot manifest in the material world unless Sawsan’s father rejects divine protection by participating in a blasphemous ritual; this treats the supernatural as fundamentally rational. The Ouija board is a means of communication not because the board has mystical powers but because Hawjan’s still-weak powers of manifestation can only move very light objects such as the bottle cap used as a planchette. Even the powers of Hawjan and his cousin/wife Jumara, which are believed by the jinn to be purely a matter of bloodline, turn out to have a further rational basis: both of them have lived among humans for extended periods and thus have grown accustomed to human ways and minds through practice.
The morality police have little to worry about here as the tone and content of HWJN are resolutely opposed to sorcery, deviance, and polytheistic practices. Abbas and Bahjatt are to be commended in their efforts to create and encourage Arabic sf. It is to be hoped that their organization, Yatakhayaloon, from Arabic yatakhayyalūn, “they imagine,” whose stated goal is “to establish the Arabic sci-fi genre, making it stand out as a unique and new view of sci-fi that would also expose the world to our rich Arabic culture,” succeeds beyond its aspirations. (HWJN is by no means the first Arabic sf novel. We can see in Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi’s 1970s novel ‘Iksir al–Hayat [The Elixir of Life] the effects on, in this case Moroccan, society of a cognitively based novum.)
Political and Social Critique
But underneath the chastity and morality of the love story, HWJN uses the trope of cognitive estrangement to provide a critique of the political and economic conditions of life in Saudi Arabia. When the human family moves into the house, Hawjan observes the father, a “self- made scholar”:
Before then he had spent two decades of his life in a small apartment, paying rent and saving every penny for his dream house. His eyes now drifted over that villa, his mind torn between happiness and amazement that a man of his stature, with the highest academic achievements and a job as one of the main decision makers in the Ministry of Health, had to go through so much to own such a small house. It really in no way lived up to his dream home. (5–6)
Eyad, by contrast, has a father who’s a well-connected businessman, lives in a home Hawjan describes as a palace, and drives a Lamborghini; he would be the very picture of the idle Saudi élite were it not for his desire to help Sawsan. Right from the beginning of the text, Saudi Arabia is portrayed as a place where the link between hard work and success on the one hand and material reward on the other is broken—and this presentation is compelling precisely because of the cognitive estrangement produced by the perspective of a rational outsider.
This economic critique is matched by a political one, though the latter is somewhat more subtle. Hawjan is one of the Nafar, or Muslim jinn; his grandfather says at one point that his own grandfather actually heard the Qur’an recited by the Prophet. When Hawjan travels to the kingdom of the Marids, his first comment is philosophical: “Even in a wicked society there are seeds of good, and in every honorable society there are aspects of evil.” His first take on the jinn city is: “It’s rare to find someone awake before sun rises [sic] there, and I saw only a few late workers who did not care about the complexity of life and had no time to review their principles and revisit their beliefs. Only work hard to survive for one more day” (83–84) His cousin Xanam says: “There’s no mercy here. Either you do what you’re told, or you’re killed” (86). Hawjan may be describing jinn society here, but displacement and allegory are modes as central to Arabic literature in general as they are to sf—remember, one of Hawjan’s first statements is that jinn do not differ so much from humans. Hawjan describes jinn society further: the righteous Nafar live far from the centers of power, which are characterized by the violent caprice of illegitimate authority. The next chapter begins:
King Hayaf was the representation of undisputable [sic] control, just like one of your Human dictators. The only difference was that the king of the Marids drew his authority from The Damned directly and was the top authority in the kingdom of the Devils, while your governments practice its [sic] injustice by relaying [sic] on the ignorance, poverty and fear of its own people and above all that they draw their so-called legitimacy—and the choice of which people they crush day and night—from God. Or so they say. (91)
It would escape few readers of HWJN’s Arabic edition that the Saudi monarchy bases its own claim to legitimacy on its custodianship of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina: this renders Hawjan’s statement that few have the time to arise early a pointed critique, as a devout Muslim should be arising well before dawn for the first daily prayer. In the West, sf can use displacement and allegory to explore ideas that if expressed directly might make people uncomfortable; in lands under authoritarian rule, these modes can explore ideas that if expressed directly might land writers in jail or worse. From Hawjan, the oppressive illegitimacy of the Saudi regime can be described and critiqued, if only indirectly and in the decentering mirror of sf. Abbas and Bahjatt have succeeded well in founding Yatakhayaloon: not only have they created sf that satisfies the generally accepted characteristics of the genre, but they’ve also used sf for one of its primary purposes—as a reflection of society. The commentator who called HWJN an “Arabic Twilight” did it a disservice: Twilight is a fantasy, a profoundly anticognitive one, and Meyer’s novel no more reflects on society than Edward does in a mirror.
Misogyny in HWJN
But it’s when we get to “exposing the world to our rich Arabic culture” that HWJN runs into some serious issues. The gravest of these is the sexism that pervades the text: males consistently treat adult women like children. Hawjan’s first real encounter with Sawsan comes when she’s weeping. He thinks she’s been dumped by a boy:
This story keeps repeating itself with you Human girls. Every day and every moment, you are so obsessed with your emotions. You never tire of your dreams. The luckiest of you uses her intelligence to distinguish a man from a jerk. (12)
This thought comes right after his characterization of Sawsan as a serious student, one who never lets anything interfere with her studies. And she’s crying because she’s just learned she has brain cancer. The male characters in the book take action; Sawsan is beautiful and suffers. Lest we think this attitude more a manifestation of a cultural misunderstanding than one of sexism, here is Hawjan’s response to Jumara’s anger when Hawjan makes a decision for her:
There is, in my opinion, a strong relationship between feminism and childhood. A female, no matter how mature she becomes, does not move far from that child inside her—the one who cannot control her tears. If she ever rebels against her inner child, she loses part of her feminism! In that sense Jumara was a perfect female.... she was not in need of my mind or logic. (124)
The Arabic text uses the word ‘unūtha, which means “femininity,” not “feminism.” The two ideas don’t even look similar in Arabic: “feminism” is usually a phrase, al-haraka al-nisa’iya, “the feminist (=“womenous”) movement” (Cowan, 38). Hawjan is not mocking the movement for women’s equality but rather characterizing the essential nature of both human and jinn women as fundamentally childlike—and this is perhaps even worse. Again, lest we think that these are merely casual remarks by a naïve young jinn, let us consider the book’s final two chapters. The penultimate chapter is the only one not narrated by Hawjan but rather by Sawsan: four years later, recovered, married to Eyad, and a mother. She writes of how, after her successful recovery from her illness, she began to see a psychiatrist, who helps her to understand that her relationship with Hawjan was an example of catatonic schizophrenia. (This is a reasonable diagnosis and not incongruent with Sawsan’s perceptions of the events leading up to her surgery.) She says that the relationship was:
a movie produced and directed by my brain made up to heal the shortcomings of my own personality—a male from another world with superpowers. I convinced myself of his existence to escape my reality as a logical, ill female. (171)
If this were the last chapter of HWJN, her formulation would hardly be problematic: she creates an opposite, so the imbalance of power between the sexes is not sexism so much as a distorted reflection of herself. We can hardly fault the therapist for trying to find a sensible rationale for what he perceives as Sawsan’s delusions; we might even argue that he and Sawsan are writing sf together, transforming an anticognitive delusion into a scientifically plausible narrative.
But unfortunately, this is not at all the case. The final chapter is told once again by Hawjan, where he describes how he and Eyad conspired to direct Sawsan’s recovery:
She started to remember me and mention me; she asked Eyad about me several times, but I warned him to deny my existence. Sawsan had to forget everything about me so she could live her normal life and dedicate all of her emotions to Eyad. However, he had a plan: he used his medical degree and some of his father’s money to open a psychiatric clinic and chose a doctor with knowledge of Sawsan’s case—me! ... She was not easily convinced: we spent one full year reigniting her spirit and self-trust, and trying to erase my memory from her heart. And it worked! (178–79)
This is a frankly atrocious level of manipulation, one that treats Sawsan as a child because she’s a woman. Hawjan the manifested human psychiatrist spends a tremendous amount of time and effort not helping Sawsan to understand that her delusion had a rational basis but rather that her rational understanding of her own experience was in fact a delusion. She can’t handle the truth, not because she’s a human but because she’s a woman: Hawjan not only conspires with her husband to manipulate her but also continues to keep in touch with Eyad via text message long after the “therapy” is complete. This isn’t a political allegory, or Hawjan would be commenting on sexism in human or jinn society rather than actively participating in it.
In fact, if we examine Twilight more closely, the comparison between the two novels falls apart. For example, Edward says that he’s attracted to Bella because he cannot read her mind like he can others’, but nowhere does Meyer provide a rational basis for Edward’s power or Bella’s exceptional nature. Yet Edward explains to her what he can, rather than keeping her in the dark, and when the vampires do manipulate her, it’s because she’s a human, not because she’s a girl.
We can and should congratulate and encourage Abbas and Bahjatt for their efforts to create, distribute, and promote Arabic sf; but we can also fervently hope that their subsequent efforts will bring to us an Arabic culture that treats women as adults—or, at the very least, brings critical acumen to bear on an Arabic culture that refuses to.
Ian Campbell lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
A Note on Sources
- Abbas, Ibrahim and Yasser Bahjatt. HWJN (2013). Jeddah: Yatakhalayoon, 2013. <www.yatakhayaloon.com>. Simultaneous Arabic and English publication. All citations are taken from the English translation unless noted; when a citation is in transliterated Arabic, page numbers for both the Arabic and English versions are given.
- Cowan, J. M., ed. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Ithaca, New York: Spoken Language Services, 1994.
- Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Thank you Ian for this amazing review, you have no idea how happy we were when we read it and realized how well we were able to convey our ideas to someone from another culture.
Although we do understand your concerns regarding the female character is presented in this novel, we would like to give you an insight of what was going on there.
As you know HWJN was not only our first novel but also the first novel of a trilogy (so to get the full view you need to read all of them). It was also the first SciFi novel written in Arabic to get such mass exposure especially amongst YA.
Because of that, we tried in HWJN to keep things simple and familiar, and we think that is why a lot of our readers felt that it was real as it reflected in most cases the reality they live in (BTW, the majority of our readers were females).
And part of the reality is how males in general, and more specifically in Saudi would think of and treat females in the way they think is respectful. And Hawjan was no exception, as a male Arab Jinni, that is how he viewed females and how he and Eyad justified to them selves what they had done at the end.
The fact of the matter is that they were both cowards, as Hawjan did not have to courage to leave Sawsan on his own and had to manipulate her to avoid make that stand on his own, while Eyad feared that if Sawsan was to know the truth he would have no chance of competing for her heart.
This will be come more apparent to you when you read our second novel Somewhere (Hunaak) where the female character is the one in charge while it feels that the male was just there fore the ride.
And then more when you read the third novel Bin-yameen that will show how furious Sawsan got when she realized the truth and how she turned out to much stronger than what Hawjan and Eyad gave her credit fore.
The reason we are doing is this way is I mentioned, we wanted to start from a familiar setting and then start expanding the view of the reader to show them the bigger picture and how such familiarity might be so wrong that it is time to change them.
Thank you again for your time to read and analyze HWJN and we hope you enjoy our other novels.
P.S. please send me your address so that we can send you signed copies of both our novels and any new ones that would come.
My twitter is @YBahjatt
Posted by: Yasser Bahjatt | 11/11/2014 at 06:39 AM