The word Jāhilīyyah means the ‘state of ignorance’ and refers to pre-Islamic times.
- ʿĀʾishah Ibrāhīm (1969-, Libya) – Ḥarb al-Ghazālah (‘War of the gazelle’, 2019). This novel is set in the Holocene period in the Tashwent Valley in the Acacus Mountains in southwestern Libya. In the novel, Kāshiyūn, the leader of the al-Māghiyū tribes, launches an attack on the Kingdom of the Mūhījāj and steals from its pens the gazelle Sāffī, which is the symbol of the tribe and the favourite deer of Queen Tandrūs. The story describes the efforts to return the dear, while depicting the matriarchal era in the Holocene period (reference) (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Tribes and Ethnicity).
- Taysīr Khalaf (1967-, Syria) – Madhbaḥat al-Falāsifah (‘The slaughter of the philosophers’, 2016). This novel is set in Palmyra and is narrated by Palmyra’s grand priest during the reign of Queen Zenobia (260 – 275). The priest tells the story of the queen, whose plans to make the city into a utopia were obstructed by forces of the Roman Emperor Aurelian, who, with the help of some Arab tribes, attacked the armies of Zenobia and ended her rule in 275. Zenobia and her council of wise men were captured and taken to Homs, where the philosophers were sentenced to death by a Roman court (reference).
- Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī’s (1911 – 2004, Tunesia) – Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra Qāl (‘Thus spoke Abu Hurairah’, 1973). Written before the 1940s, but published only in 1973, this novel carries the echoes the socio-political woes of the 1940s such as the anti-colonial struggle and questions of Arab identity (reference). These questions are reflected through the protagonist, Abū Hurayra, a real historical Islamic character, through the use of early Islamic Arabic and by asking existential questions in a context of misguided, weak, and hypocritical humans living before Islam (reference) (also in R: Religion and Sectarianism: Islam: Quran, Ḥadīth and Religious Practices).
- Yūsuf Zaydān (1958-, Egypt) – Al-Nabaṭī (‘The Nabatean’, 2010). This novel focuses on a woman who marries into the Nabatean tribe, an ancient group of Arab people living across West Asia before the arrival of Christianity and Islam. The story describes the conditions of women in pre-Islamic Egypt through the eyes of its heroine, an 18-year-old woman, during three different phases of her life (reference). In the first, a Nabatean Arab proposes to marry her, in the second phase, the heroine, her husband and his caravan return to her husband’s land. In the third phase she settles with her husband and his family. In this last phase she falls in love with her husband’s brother.
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Yūsuf ʿAbbūd Juwīʿad. 2020. “Naqd: Taqniyyāt al-Sard wa Usṭurat al-Aḥdāth fī ‘Ḥarb al-Ghazālah’.” www.akhbar-alkhaleej.com, 4 January 2020. http://www.akhbar-alkhaleej.com/news/article/1195722 (last accessed 11 April 2021)
- ʿAbdal-Raḥman Ḥabīb. 2021. “Riwāyat al-Jawāʾiz … Taysīr Khalaf Yastadʿī Tārīkh Mamlakat Tadmur fī ‘Madhbaḥat al-Falāsifah’.” www.youm7.com, 20 November 2021 https://www.youm7.com/story/2021/11/20/روايات-الجوائز-تيسير-خلف-يستدعى-تاريخ-مملكة-تدمر-فى-مذبحة/5543763 (last accessed 31 January 2022)
- Ismail Fayed. 2023. “What Messadi’s Abu Hurairah Didn’t Say.” www.notedfromoberthere.org, 31 May 2023, https://www.notesfromoverthere.org/blog-ismail-fayed/mahmoud-messadi-abu-hurairah-said (last accessed 25 November 2023)
- al-Kabīr al-Dādīsī. 2018. Masārāt al-riwāyah al-ʿarabiyyah al-muʿāṣirah, Muʾassah al-raḥāb al-ḥadīthah: Bayrūt, p. 132-3