THE NIGHT WILL HAVE ITS SAY, historical fiction about the Muslim Wars of Conquest

THE NIGHT WILL HAVE ITS SAY
IBRAHIM al-KONI
Hoopoe Books
$18.95 trade paper, available now

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu'man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Nu'man's forces.

The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the seventh century CE, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni's unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts.

Al-Koni's masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile—from language, the desert, and homeland.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm kind of an outlier among this book's Anglophone readers: I like the formal, "speechifying" tone. This is historical fiction about the incredibly consequential events surrounding the Arab Wars of Conquest, specifically of the Maghreb. This century-long expansion of Islam and political control by Baghdad's rulers formed the fault lines of our present-day world. It felt appropriate to me that the words they spoke on the page were...heightened...not quotidian, not the same ones you'd use to ask your housekeeper why your nan's vase is suddenly chipped.

So, please understand that I'm aware of the formality, the speech-giving style, the focus on the characters as actors on the world's stage, and am okay with and invested in that. The consequentiality of the events in this book very definitely merit it. The author is telling this story from the PoV of the conquered, not the triumphal and celebratory version preferred (see the linked Wikipedia article) by the conquerors. In many ways the story is so very astonishing that it feels a bit like a fantasy epic. This story's The Lord of the Rings, only for real...and y'all lap up that deep-purple prose.

Give this a shot.

About the story itself I am so ignorant that I can point to no departures from History's pages. The North African civilizations were very old indeed. Pharaonic Egypt had diplomatic ties and cultural interchanges with the Libyan cultures millennia ago; the Berbers are, I think, their descendants. Roman, Byzantine, and then Arab Muslim conquests have overlaid rulers and rules and religion on the enduring people. The book's assumption of the conquered ones' voices is delightful to me, who daily bumps against the heterohegemony and religious restrictiveness on my right to exist. To have a woman assering her and her people's right to exist as they are and have always been, against a man sent to chnage them on a basic level, seems like a story you're going to want to read just now. It's not like it's got any modern resonances, is it? A woman standing up for freedom to exist unchanged against an overbearing, bloviating hypocrite of a man?

I'm suddenly seeing an orange haze between me and the screen....

However much I want you to read this story, I feel there's a resistance inside my mostly Anglophone and largely American readers. It's about people you know (most likely) nothing about. It takes the side of the powerless, to induce you to get over that hurdle. It's negatively focused on religion. The main character is a woman asserting herself, to get you over that hurdle. The prose is...well...I said above it's heightened, and really, given the stuff I see y'all reading, I don't think that's a hurdle you need much help getting over in and of itself. I suspect most objections like that are more about resisting the unfamiliarity of the subject matter. I strongly encourage you to get over that hurdle. This story is deeply rooted in an entire ancient civilization's resistance to being restyled and remade to suit the opinions of powerful men with an arsenal of weapons superior to its own and fueled by rage and the lust for Control.

These stakes should resonate with all y'all in the Anglophone world, and I hope inspire you to resist what we see around us from becoming normal.

Again.