In Conversation: The Possibilities for Doing ‘Right’ in 14th Century Morocco & Spain

OCTOBER 15, 2024 — Mohamed Seif El Nasr’s debut novel, Then He Sent Prophets, is out today from Daraja Press. This striking novel, set between fourteenth-century Morocco and Spain, follows a young scholar named Zakaria trying to do “right” in the world as he balances individual ego, his responsibilities to his family, and his love of the wider community and world.

Today, Mohamed talks to us about the book and the research process, and he also shares a list of twenty-two books that were essential for understanding the era. (Understanding Medieval Morocco and Granada in 22 Reads.)

I want to start by saying I really enjoyed reading this novel. When I was away from it, I wanted to get back to this world, to re-immerse myself. A large part of that drive was Zakaria, who wants so much to do right in the world (even as he sometimes gets in a muddle, can be jealous and short-tempered). Was Zakaria based on a historical figure or historical sources? Or is he built from inspirations nearer to us in time?

Mohamed Seif El Nasr: Concerning Zakaria’s character, I believe it is a blend of what you mentioned. The critical thinking and rationality part of his character is based historically on Muhammad al-Abili, Ibn Khaldun’s tutor. Al-Abili, who was known throughout the Maghreb as the great master of the rational sciences, was a fascinating figure with unconventional views. He actively tried to avoid official posts throughout his life, famously refused to write books, and was heavily critical of the schooling (madaress) system at the time of the Marinid dynasty, which followed a curriculum imposed by the authorities and which, he believed, created restrained mentalities.

As for the morality part of Zakaria’s personality, his desire to do right in the world, and his struggle to understand the motives behind his desire to be moral, I believe my main inspiration was my own experience and that of my close friends. On the one hand, many of our generation here in Egypt had our moral compass sharpened during the Arab Spring, became driven by the desire to do right in the world, and tried to identify ourselves within the global political spectrum (which would naturally lead anyone to lean left). On the other hand, and this is heavily alluded to in the novel as part of Zakaria’s character development, once you try to associate yourself with people who are supposedly doing right in the world, there’s always the sad discovery, which would come sooner or later, that many of them are more motivated by egoism rather than love for the people and a genuine desire to help others—that depressing realization that social activism is oftentimes a mask for personal egoism—and then you find yourself questioning your own motives.

What does this particular historical moment, in Morocco and Islamic Spain, allow you to explore—thematically, ideationally—that other historical moments might not?

MSEN: One of the things that really upsets me is hearing, from both affluent Egyptians and foreigners who regularly visit Egypt, about how Egyptians as a people have “changed” over the past decade—how our national character has suffered, how we’ve become less humorous, and, in many instances, less honest.

And, most unfortunately, there is truth in that. It is undeniable that the political repression and increasing economic deprivation of the past years have negatively affected the general characteristics of Egyptians. We are indeed people who have lost their sense of humor to deprivation, and many of us are now at risk of losing our morality. And it is normal. After all, how dare we expect people who cannot afford to pay for the medical care of their parents or, even without going to this extreme, to buy new shoes for their children, to be humorous? Who are we to judge those who, because of repression, can’t even protest their situation, if they tried to cheat us or accepted a bribe?

Back to the novel, historians often mark the year 1358 as the beginning of the decline of the Marinid dynasty, which, in my opinion, is the last Moroccan dynasty that could be considered a world power. The decline was steep on both the economic and political levels. So, while there are, of course, many historical periods where people were subjected to both economic deprivation and political repression, the historical moment of the novel was a moment of change, with many similarities to our current political climate, that allowed me to explore how the steep economic decline, when coupled with repression, could affect people’s characters, cultivate the worst traits in them, drive them to moral compromises, and how it is the duty of those who are not subjected to such conditions (or subjected to it, but to a lesser extent) to make more effort to change the status quo, the underlying causes, instead of complaining and lamenting that their less fortunate countrymen have “changed.”

Once you had this idea firmly in mind, how did you go about doing the necessary research? How much research did you think was necessary? What were your main sources? What about visual sources and resources, since you had to imagine how things looked in the fourteenth century?

MSEN: If you want to learn about medieval Morocco from contemporary sources, it is almost impossible not to begin by reading Ibn Khaldun’s works. And if you want to learn about the Emirate of Granada, the same applies to Ibn al-Khatib’s works. And if you want to get a general sense of the medieval Muslim world in the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta’s Travels is a great place to start. Now, all three men lived at the time of the novel, so I read their works in addition to other contemporary sources, like the Chronicle of King Pedro. To read contemporary historical sources, often dealing with the same historical events but with different biases and from different points of view (Marinid vs. Granadan vs. Castilian), was a truly satisfying experience, allowing anyone to get a clear picture of what really took place.

But in hindsight, because this was my first time researching for a novel, I think that I did more research than was necessary. If I were to do it again, I would spend much more time and effort deciding which sources to focus on and less time reading the books themselves. I guess al-Abili had a point in his belief that the abundance of books and information might be counter-productive to the seeking of knowledge.

As for the visual sources, I visited all the locations of the novel on three different trips and stayed for extended periods in both Fes and Granada. This was, again, what I now regard as more effort than I should have exerted. I have hours of embarrassing video footage that would make you laugh if you watched them, doing strange things like counting the steps from the castle walls to the river, seeing how tall my shadow would appear if I stood on this hill at that time, and so on.

Well, as a reader, I absolutely felt the deep research and care put into this novel, and greatly appreciate it. Not all historical novels are so careful with big details, much less the drape of a character’s shadow. Are there historical novels you particularly admire (or hate), from which you feel Then He Sent Prophets is borrowing, building upon (or pushing back against)?

MSEN: As far as I know, Radwa Ashour’s Granada, Amin Maalouf’s Leo Africanus, and Tariq Ali’s Shadow of a Pomegranate Tree are the most well-known historical novels about Granada. These three works are very dissimilar, but I liked all of them, and I think that enjoying them was part of my decision to write a novel set in Granada.

If there’s something I wanted to push back against, it is how most novels about Granada focus on its fall with an emphasis on the struggle between Muslims and Christians—implying that the Granadans as a people were homogenous with the rest of the Islamic world and sort of a polar opposite to their Christian neighbors. The Spanish Muslims were, in reality, a distinct people, having as much in common with the Spanish Christians as with the Marinid Muslims, and they were denounced and not accepted by either. A tragedy that made itself apparent at the time of their expulsion when they were not, for the most part, accepted in the Maghreb and were accused of being “Christians” because of their cultural differences, which led them to be known as الغرباء “the strangers,” implying they are not tolerated anywhere and are outsiders everywhere.

To give you a better idea of how distinct and racially mixed the Granadans were, Thomas F. Glick, a well-known historian, states in one of his books that by the year 1000 (already around 350 years before the novel), 75% of the ingenious population of Spain had converted to Islam. This was certainly no secret to contemporaries, and I allude to this in the novel by mentioning how one of the main characters, the overthrown king of Granada, states with confidence that he’s of Arab descent while both his mother and grandmother were Christian concubines.

So, by choosing a time period just preceding the emirate’s golden age, I wanted to emphasize the point that the Granadans were a distinct people, commend their ability to survive for almost 260 years against all odds, and also show how unfair the later expulsion of a large part of them by the Catholic kings (who used the religious/racial card in their propaganda) was since most of the Granadans were actually natives to the land.

Can you tell us about the translation work you did for the novel? Of course poetry had to be there — what did you want to capture about the verse as you integrated it into your novel?

MSEN: As I mentioned, I relied mainly on contemporary sources in Arabic. My methodology was that I would read the text in Arabic and take the notes in English to be able to use it in the novel; not the easiest of processes, but it allowed me to try to infuse the novel with an authentic feel by using literal translations when describing places and people, and sometimes in dialogue when writing insults and jokes, at the risk of sounding awkward to the modern reader. The examples I recall now are “a restless snake that never sleeps rages between his ribs” and “only an ass is provoked and does not get angry,” which are literal translations of actual sayings by people at the time of the novel.

As for the verses, I only translated the verses in Chapter 5 about the muezzins who spy on girls on the rooftops, which was a repeated complaint throughout Islamic history that at one time led an Umayyad ruler to demolish all the mosques’ minarets in his city and in at another time led to a great riot in Marrakesh, if I recall correctly. I found these stories entertaining, and I only tried to keep the humorous tone in my translation. The rest of the poetry is used with permission or acknowledgment, depending on how much is borrowed from the translator’s work.

How do you go about writing a character like Ibn Khaldun, who so many people have feelings about? When imagining his speech patterns, his attitudes, his bearing—when did you try to find sources and when did you invent?

MSEN: I think it is difficult to read Ibn Khaldun’s work and not think of him as highly clever and meticulous—someone who usually thinks before he speaks. As for his general attitudes and bearing, there are two contemporary figures of Ibn Khaldun who are polar opposites, and I placed Ibn Khaldun between them. At one end of the spectrum is al-Abili, Ibn Khaldun’s tutor, whom I mentioned before and who actively avoided official posts and never sought power or recognition. At the other end of the spectrum is Ibn Marzuq, the sultan’s advisor in the novel, who has risen to power through his praise of sultans (he was a preacher), never seemed ashamed of using his knowledge and eloquence to advance in the world, and who has written a whole book flattering a late sultan in the hope of gaining the favor of his son.

Ibn Khaldun, to me, falls between these two men. Like al-Abili, he wanted many times in his life to retire from the world and focus on his writing and his knowledge-seeking (he actually did it once and spent some time in a monastic establishment), but he also had strong political aspirations and a big ego, which filled him with the desire, when “inside” the system, to advance more than his peers by any means and seek power, as evidenced by his various political intrigues and many enmities, which led many people to label him as an opportunist.

To me, he was the kind of person who would love and treat well those who loved and appreciated him, but because of his ego, he would be hostile and competitive with those who did not appreciate him or tried to prove they were better than him.

Although the lives of court advisors and scribes is important to the narrative, so is the food, medicine, and medical knowledge of the time. How did you research what doctors might say about Zakaria’s daughter’s illness (which seemed like childhood asthma to me)? I also loved that some of the foods were unappealing—so you didn’t just need to research the best food and drink from that period, but also, for instance, Zakaria’s grandmother’s disgusting drink.

MSEN: I was indeed thinking of childhood asthma and already knew that inhaling steam from saltwater was prescribed to relieve respiratory symptoms from ancient times. In the novel, Zakaria’s daughter’s illness is meant to be symbolic. Because ancient and medieval texts, including Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, usually emphasize how water and humidity are necessary for life, I thought it was symbolic that a newborn, whose spirit was just trapped in a body, should suffer from respiratory distress due to fluid on the arteries (mucosa). This also leads to Zakaria’s first compromise in the novel when he accepts the job at the palace and his transition from the symbol earth (dry) to water (wet), and goes with one of the novel’s themes that more life leads to more compromise.

As for the use of opium, I had the idea to use it as a treatment for Zakaria’s illness because it was used by the Arabs to treat pleurisy and because I saw it repeatedly mentioned (including the warning that its excess is poisonous) in a brief summary Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, which I knew from contemporary sources was still the primary resource despite being written in the 11th century. I also wanted the last part of the novel to have a somewhat surreal feel and knew from my research about Sufism that many Turkish dervishes who wandered through the Ottoman Empire were notorious for their use of opium.

To circle back to Zakaria’s grandmother (and the drink she seemed to think Zakaria enjoyed), she was one of the characters who I felt held the book together, both because of her frivolity and her rectitude, and how both of these challenges Zakaria’s vision of the world. One of the things I thought you did really well was create fully dimensional women characters without making characters we like share our contemporary values. I mean, Zakaria is almost feminist, in a way, but he can also be pretty casual about women’s rights and lives if he’s not in love. How did you work at keeping the characters in their own distinct time, with their distinct beliefs?

MSEN: To be honest, and this is sad to admit, I think this was not very difficult for me because Egypt and the wider Arab World have not progressed much on the cultural level from the time of the novel until our present day—which is quite frustrating when you know how someone like Ibn Rushd wrote about women’s rights with great clarity almost a millennia ago. I myself can see the contradictions in my friends, and admittedly in myself, too, when it comes to feminism. We heartily support it ideologically, but the contradiction is there in our inability—both men and women—to fully apply it in our lives. So, it was not very difficult to imagine Zakaria, who would have been obviously aware of Ibn Rushd’s writing, believing in feminism ideologically (or whenever it suited him) but not fully applying it in his life.

Can you tell us about the title? What work did you want the title to do in both drawing people to the book and signposting what we should expect, as readers?

MSEN: The title is taken from the novel’s epigraph, but even before I decided on that, I wanted it to have the word “prophet.” To me, a prophet is someone with a message most pertinent to their times. Their coming indicates that something is deeply wrong with their world and offers a solution, regardless of whether they succeed. So, I wanted the title to convey that the book deals with fundamental human issues and has a message at the end. I also did not want the title to be singular, to stress that real historical change is always a collective, not an individual, effort.

Back a bit to the intertextuality: Toward the end of the novel, Zakaria begins telling the young Yassin a version of Hayy ibn Yaqzan (by Ibn Tufail, which, since it is a book-length fiction, is sometimes called the “first Arabic novel”). Why does Zakaria choose to tell this story to this boy in this moment of loss and destruction—a kind of starting-over story—and can you talk about the ways in which he modifies the story, and what that means (about Zakaria, about storytelling, about Hayy ibn Yaqzan)?

MSEN: Throughout the novel, I tried to make Zakaria progress from an individualist approach to life to a family-first approach (after the birth of his daughter) to an umma/community approach as a prelude to his final realization about the oneness of being and love-for-all. The principal problem with this love-for-all concept as a spiritual objective is that I believe that its extreme form renders people passive in life and pushes them to seclusion. On the contrary, I always observed that negative characteristics like ego, pride, and tribalism often drive people to take an active part in life and perform “good” deeds, especially ones that necessitate strength of will and determination, like protecting close ones or standing up to injustices.

I used the retelling of Hayy ibn Yaqzan in the novel to shed light on the above contradiction, which, to me, is an unsolved dilemma. At the end of the story, Zakaria has (almost) gotten rid of his ego/self and has this epiphany about the oneness of being and love-for-all. It comes to him, however, with the realization that dealing with people and functioning in society will compromise his new-found spiritual state and that he must seek seclusion (like Ibn Tufayl suggested). Deep down, however, and because of his background, he still cannot tell whether his desire to “escape” is a weakness when the word is full of evil that needs rectifying.

When he’s recounting the story to Yassin with an emphasis on Hayy’s “escape” and “giving up,” he’s actually trying to convince himself of Ibn Tufail’s conclusion—that escape (rising above the world) is the only choice for people who have reached a certain spiritual truth—but he is instantly confronted by the child who accuses Hayy of weakness, which is further reinforced for Zakaria as he helplessly watches the man hitting the girl-servant by the river. He still tries to “escape” at the end and pretend this is his only choice—but I wanted to show that he is not doing it like he wanted to—with full conviction.