The Sacred Night [Paperback]

Tahar Ben Jelloun (Author), Alan Sheridan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2000

The Sacred Night continues the remarkable story Tahar Ben Jelloun began in The Sand Child. Mohammed Ahmed, a Moroccan girl raised as a boy in order to circumvent Islamic inheritance laws regarding female children, remains deeply conflicted about her identity. In a narrative that shifts in and out of reality moving between a mysterious present and a painful past, Ben Jelloun relates the events of Ahmed's adult life. Now calling herself Zahra, she renounces her role as only son and heir after her father's death and journeys through a dreamlike Moroccan landscape. A searing allegorical portrait of North African society, The Sacred Night uses Arabic fairy tales and surrealist elements to craft a stunning and disturbing vision of protest and rebellion against the strictures of hidebound traditions governing gender roles and sexuality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sequel to The Sandchild and winner of 1987's Prix Goncourt, Ben Jalloun's powerfully imagined, hallucinatory tale of Zahra, "flower of flowers," fraudulently raised in contemporary Morocco as the boy Ahmed by a father ashamed of his brood of daughters, has affinities with the magic realism of Garcia Marquez, Rushdie and others. A victim of what is to her the hypocritical misogyny of Bedouin culture that betrays Islam while piously invoking it, Zahra/Ahmed is afforded rebirth as a beautiful woman by her father at the moment of his death. During his burial, a magnificent stranger riding on horseback--"the Sheikh"--spirits Zahra away, clothed in a bride's golden burnoose, starting her both joyous and tormented odyssey as a woman in a Moslem land. Suffering as both man and woman, Zahra transcends the confining sexism of her culture and reaches an understanding of others' anguish, aided by the blind "Consul," whose lack of sight enables him to see beyond society's categories and appearances. Told in a declamatory, incisive style, Ben Jalloun's perplexing, poetic narrative challenges the reader to see and feel deeply.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Reared as a boy by a father desperate for a son, the lovely Zahra at the age of 20 must enter the world for the first time as a woman. This confusion of sexual roles--a special paradox in an Arab Muslim culture--colors all of her experiences, both real and hallucinatory. Raped by a faceless man and terrified by ghosts, Zahra seems to find a haven with a strange sister and brother: the Seated Woman and a blind Consul. But when a miserly uncle threatens to expose her shameful past, she murders him and is imprisoned for the crime. As Jelloun's vivid, incantatory prose makes clear, it is not her cell but the story of her own life that binds her, causing her to seek "the pleasure of astonishment, the innocence of knowing the beginning of things." A sequel to The Sand Child, winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt, by a Morocco-born writer now living in Paris.
- L.M. Lewis, Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (May 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801864410
• ISBN-13: 978-0801864414
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautiful view of North Africa, July 18, 2009

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Monique V. King MD "book lover" (Tucson AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sacred Night (Paperback)

THis is a lovely piece of writing about a culture which is little known: North Africa. It is about love and sensuousness.