The Orchards of Basra

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A historical novel that shifts between contemporary Cairo and Ancient Iraq.

Hisham Al Khattab is Yazid ibn Abih. At least he thinks he is. Some 13 centuries separate the two, but in the despaired mind of Hisham Al Khattab, and through the magical power of dreams, Hisham is Yazid.

Hisham, who is passionate about ancient manuscripts and lives off the antique book trade, is haunted by a dream in which he sees angels picking all the jasmine flowers in Basra. However, this dream is listed and interpreted in a very old book that he loves: it would be the premonitory sign of the disappearance of all the thinkers of the city. Prey to fantasies, he constantly navigates between two worlds: contemporary Cairo where he lives and Basra at the end of the 8th century, a fascinating city and a major intellectual and religious center of the nascent Islamic empire.

In this parallel world, Hisham meets a character in whom he recognizes his double, a man named Yazid Ibn Abihi, who frequents the circle of rationalist theologians and adopts their doctrines, later harshly opposed by orthodoxy. A strong friendship immediately links him with one of their disciples, and their story—made of terrible betrayals—then becomes the pivot of the novel.

The author alternates scenes, periods, and interior monologues, and masterfully handles levels of language, giving her story a polyphonic dimension. In passing, she manages to finely address certain theological questions debated at the time, notably the creation by God of human acts. A message, perhaps, emerges here, in resonance with Hisham’s dream: if there is no longer jasmine in the orchards of Basra, it is because with the closure of the sacred texts on themselves, Muslim religious thought has gradually become ossified.

In this almost historical fiction, dream and reality are one and the same, and the boundaries between reason and madness are dangerously shifting. Similarly to the life of Yazid bin Abih, the life of Hisham is tainted with violence—a violence so crude, it strangely gives reality to the tales of the 8th century.

With her fluid writing, Mansoura Ez-Eldin beautifully shifts from contemporary Egypt to ancient Iraq, fleshing them both out with few but so specific details, that the scenes come alive in the reader’s mind. Like the jasmine that repeatedly falls to the ground, there seems to be no end to the downfall of the likes of Hisham and Yazid, or to the fall of Ulamas, the men of knowledge.