Azazil Once More

Azazil Once More
Manal el-Jesri

It was with a lot of trepidation that I picked up Azazil (Beelzebub); the book not the devil. The controversy around it had reached its peak and had started to wane when I started reading Azazil, Dr. Youssef Ziedan's second novel, earlier this year. I felt like I was the last person in Cairo to read it. It was a case of intellectual snobbishness that I sadly confess to, and that would have cost me dearly. Merely because I am usually skeptical about best-selling books and books that stir so much controversy, I would have missed the pleasure of reading one of the best books (and I use the wider term, not just 'novels') that I had come across in recent years, and in any language.
I will spare you the story of the religious controversy surrounding Azazil, if you promise to take this controversy out of your mind as you read these lines. What we want to do here is take an alternative look into what makes Azazil the wholesome intellectual and emotional repast that it is, and which contributed to its winning the IPAF (International Prize for Arab Fiction), better known as the Arabic Booker last March.
The first thing that draws the reader into this work is the ease with which Ziedan uses the Arabic language. A difficult language to master, the Arabic language has been compromised in the past couple of decades, partly due to the quality of school education in this country. Novels that have topped best-seller charts in the past few years and have been translated into various languages use a language that is weak, unappealing and at times offensive. One such novelist recently confessed in an interview that language is nothing but a vessel, a medium through which to convey his ideas. I am certain greats like the poet al Mutanabbi and even the late Laureate Naguib Mahfouz turned in their graves at such blasphemy. This is not the case with Ziedan. A professor of Islamic Philosophy and a Sufist with numerous published books critiquing the subtleties of Sufi poetry, Ziedan uses a language that borders on poetry. Sentences can be taken out of context and studied for their beauty and depth, something that is rarely as enjoyable when dealing with prose. Take this sentence, for example, a favorite of mine: "There are no straight lines except in our illusions, or in the papers on which we put down our illusions. As for life and the universe, everything is cyclical, going back to what it started from, submerging into what it connected with." It is Sufi language, the perfect choice for a story of a religious nature. Here language is not merely a medium; it is one of the novel's characters. It is also one manifestation of the author's dogma: as an Islamic thinker writing about the roots of Christian beliefs, Ziedan displays his belief in the continuity and concentricity of religions.
The language, as a character, draws the reader closer to Hepa the monk, the narrator and main protagonist. Hepa's identity as a Christian monk of the 5th century is one of the first tricks Ziedan plays on us. Hepa is not just a monk. He is not a two-dimensional character, that monk or saint we see in icons adorning Orthodox churches, with his eyes cast towards the heavens and his hands turned outward and up in supplication. And do not get me wrong, Hepa is indeed that seeker of religious grace. But he is also a human being, a lover, a poet, an intellectual, and most importantly, a skeptic. Hepa is a character that you can pull out of Azazil and place in any era. He is the human being who was denied his mother's love. He is the lover who succumbs to temptation of the flesh, who falls in love and like us all makes wrong choices that cause him to waste one opportunity after the other. He is the poet who extols God's graciousness and beauty, the writer who is prompted by his inner demon to put his thoughts down to paper. He is also the skeptic who questions everything, which makes him a modern character that we direly need in our own reality, where even celebrated intellectuals are ready to take pre-packaged ideas and beliefs for granted, and are also ready to pass judgment on those who dares think outside the box.
And Hepa would not be Hepa without the women in his life. The female protagonists in Azazil make ephemeral but effective entrances in the novel. And each time one of them makes a presence, Hepa's life is turned upside down. The women here act as the catalyst that sets Hepa's world in motion. The writer paints them with a lot of love and attention, for they are all the manifestations of the ultimate female. She shows four of her manifestations here; the cruel mother, the wise scientist and philosopher, the sensual lover, and the potential partner. This female presence is reminiscent of Ziedan's first novel, Dhell el-Af'aa (The Snake's Shadow), in which the writer tackles the extremely controversial issue of the sanctity of the female before the dawn of religions.
Hepa, then, who I see as one of the most comprehensive characters in Arabic literature, is Ziedan's human being. He is inside each one of us. He is the person on a quest, the center of the game that we call life. And his inner demon, Azazil, keeps him going, seeking more answers, reaching out for absolution and freedom. It is one way of looking at the devil. As Ziedan believes that we bestow holiness on what we hold sacred, we also bestow evil characteristics on what we regard as base or too worldly. We create our own demons by refusing to be true to ourselves, Ziedan tells us. So yes, Azazil is a controversial novel, but not because of the Christian controversy it represents, because that religious controversy regarding the nature of Christ did take place and Ziedan merely writes about it with historical accuracy and faithfulness. What makes Azazil a remarkable contribution to world literature is its depiction of that eternal existential human dilemma.