Aunt Safiyya

My first impression of Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery was not a very good one at all, it was irritating to have to keep flipping back and forth to the glossary through out the first chapter and the introduction hardly sparked my interest. At first i thought the story was going to be about a Muslim boy who made friends with a monk at a Christian monastery and would try and make sense of the Muslim/Christian dispute that has been going on for many years.

Boy was i wrong!

Thankfully chapter two picked up with the death of Harbi's uncle and all the drama leading up to it, i must say it was interesting to find that these people were acting in such ways as their ancestors of Mesopotamia and Hamurabi's code. It was also captivating to watch Aunt Safiyya's gruesome transformation.

Chapter three was by far my favorite chapter in the whole novel, the outlaw Faris and his men and learning about the hard labor required of prisoners kept the pages burning through my fingers not to mention the suspense of what would happen to Harbi with Safiyya's son gradually getting older. I thought it was also moving the way that Bishai healed the muslim mans leg towards the end of the chapter where all the oulaws were gathered in defense of Harbi even though it was Faris who shot his own man.

Chapter four was just depressing and shattered all my hopes for a revenge plot time hardly had passed between cahpter three and four and eventually everyone died by the will of god and Safiyya went crazy.

This book was hard to follow with all the Arabic names and vocabulary, i thought there was just as much to learn from this novel as any other american literature so i am thankful to find out that Middle Eastern literature is not going to be filled of anti-american slander.