A journey between time, faith, and sin in Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s The Orchards of Basra by Noshin Bokth in The New Arab, February 19th, 2025
Acclaimed Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s novel The Orchards of Basra is a captivating novel that centres around Hisham Al Khattab, an antique bookseller in Cairo.
Though his occupation appears lackluster, he is a complex character whose tenuous thread with reality is disturbed by a strange dream. His journey to understand this vision takes him to Basra at the end of the Umayyad period. There, he learns of a man named Yazid ibn Abih, whom he believes to be his past self. The two lives become tightly connected, despite the millennia separating the two and against all truth.
Mansoura has created an extraordinary narrative that explores the themes of sin and morality, drawing readers into an intellectual journey. Through Hisham/Yazid, she delves into Islamic philosophy, particularly the principles debated by the Mu’tazila school of thought. Is the one who sins a believer or an infidel?
Shifting between modern Egypt and ancient Iraq, the reader is forced to confront this doctrine, as violence torments the lives of these men and those around them. It is a haunting story that explores Islamic theological debates, the impact of choices on life, and the unraveling of the human psyche.
Dreams and revelations
Hisham lives with his frustrated mother, Layla, and makes a living by finding and reselling rare manuscripts. One night, he experiences a peculiar dream that sets his life on a new path, influencing his decisions and the people he encounters…
Mu’tazila school of thought explored
The novel is divided into six chapters, telling a historical story that shifts back and forth between Hisham’s decline and Yazid’s fall.
The chapters move between characters, times, locations, and even perspectives, detailing Hisham’s quest to understand the visions that lead him to become the confidant of a disgruntled scholar named Al-Zandiq (the atheist), a defender of the revisionist view of Islam in modern-day Egypt. While helping Al-Zandiq with research, Hisham discovers obscure works that document Yazid’s life.
As Hisham immerses himself in these works, along with an 8th-century manuscript titled The Great Book of the Interpretation of Dreams, his life begins to merge with Yazid’s, blurring the lines between the two.
While fantasies and truths alarmingly become one, Mansoura skillfully raises numerous questions about predestination, free will, morality, and sin, topics that Muslim scholars have theorised about for centuries.
As the novel progresses and the reader is enlightened about each character’s life, tales of subterfuge and pandemonium, involving violent crimes and motives, are revealed, with both Yazid and Hisham committing crude offenses with perverted rationales, while even their cohorts make choices deemed significant sins in Islam.
She powerfully discusses the doctrine of the Mu’tazila school of thought, a prominent branch of Islamic philosophy that emphasises rationality and free will, as well as the disagreements between scholars and their students regarding the principles of sin and justice. Mansoura brings to life the early beginnings of this school in the discussion circles that Yazid attends…
An invitation to reflect and theorise
Using multiple narrators, settings, and time periods requires a skill that Mansoura masters.
The distinctive construction of the novel highlights her fluid storytelling. The reader must focus on following the inner worlds of each character, as well as the place and time in which they exist. They are instantly transported to ancient Basra through evocative descriptions of agriculture, fishing scenes, boats in the marshes, and the simple life of weavers and bookmakers…
Philosophical concepts echoing today’s world
The Orchards of Basra is a poignant novel, written with poetic elegance.
It is a thought-provoking tale that brings the reader intimately close to not just one, but all of the key characters. The novel succeeds in challenging the depths of the reader’s mind and faith, while transcending time and space. As readers journey through this confessional narrative, they will be transfixed by the unraveling of Hisham’s mind and Yazid’s life…