Habibi

One of the great monuments of storytelling is The 1,001 Nights, or The 1,001 Arabian Nights, as it has come to be known in the West. It is a collection of stories from various Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African cultures, gathered together over century upon century into the collection familiar to readers today. The first English translation of the stories first appeared in 1706, when it was known by the title The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

The collection of stories contained within varies, depending on region and translator, but the frame story is almost always the same: a Persian king, traumatized by his wife's adultery, decides that all women must be like her, and weds a succession of virgins whom he executes the following morning, believing that doing so will prevent them from ever dishonoring him ever again. But when the realm runs out of virgins, the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, volunteers herself as the next bride, and on the night of their marriage, she begins to tell the king a story, but ends it on a cliffhanger at dawn so that the king is forced to stall her execution until she finishes the story. She does so, but continues with another story, and on and on, for a few hundred nights or the literal one thousand and one, depending on the version one reads. Whatever the case, Scheherazade is spared the executioner's block, and she and the king live happily ever after.

The tales themselves are richly varied in their content: tragedies, comedies, romances, historical tales, poetry, even erotica. Sometimes these stories themselves form the frames for even more stories, so that, like Russian matryoshka dolls or Chinese nested boxes, the stories are layered, one within the other, forming a rich tapestry of narratives one could easily compare to the intricate latticework so common in Arabic decorative motifs.

Craig Thompson's latest work, Habibi, is easily compared to The 1,001 Nights, albeit the comparison is rather loose. True, there is a beautiful storyteller, and there is a king somewhere along the way, and the settings are strange and exotic, but this is absolutely not The 1,001 Nights. Habibi is about other things, things that are as timeless as The 1,001 Nights, but which are still valuable - and maybe more valuable - to contemporary readers.

On the most obvious level, Habibi is a story about two people: Dodola and Zam. Their first meeting in a slave market, with Zam still a very young child and Dodola just marked as a slave after her husband's murder, is not only fortuitous, but also fated. For several years after that first meeting and their subsequent escape from the slave market, they live together out in the desert, in a boat that has somehow been left behind in the middle of all that sand. But then things go terribly wrong when Dodola is captured by the sultan's men and brought to his harem, where she remains for several more years before a chance encounter with Zam - now a eunuch - brings the two of them back together again, never to be parted.

The novel is, of course, more than just that. With a page count in the upper 600s, there is more to Habibi than a simple love story, and yet love is one of, if not the most, important themes. The title itself, Habibi, is Arabic for “my beloved.” But the love story is not so simple as the summary above might make it. It is far more complex than that, and is not only about romantic love. Like the layered stories in The 1,001 Arabian Nights, love as described and tackled in Habibi is layered and multifaceted, as complex as Arabian latticework. The love shared between Dodola and Zam is just one facet, one aspect: there is so much more said about love in the novel, so much that when the reader reaches that final page, one ends the story with a weight in one's heart and a tear in one's eye for all the love that has been found, lost, and found again.

Habibi also speaks of religion, and more importantly, of faith. The wars in the Middle East in the early 2000s, and the rise of the Arab Spring movement, make Habibi an incredibly timely book when one thinks of how prominent Islam has become in the world's consciousness. Some might be leery of reading Habibi, thinking it a Westerner's take on Islam and thus flawed. Perhaps this might be true, but as far as I can tell, Thompson does not write of anything that might be construed as insulting to any religion. He quotes from the Qur'an, and the hadiths, and the great poets of Islam, but he leaves it up to the reader to come to his or her own decision regarding the material. This is why I say this book is about faith and not religion, per se. That is not the point. Whatever one's religion might be, faith is by far more important. One can call God anything one wants, but this matters little in the long run, or in the end. Faith is what counts, and Habibi emphasizes this - a powerful reminder that, in the 21st century, what one calls one's God really shouldn't be as important as it was in the 10th to 11th centuries.

Another powerful and timely theme explored in the novel is that of humanity's relationship to nature. Over and over again ,the world that Dodola and Zam inhabit is described as “dead” or “dying.” There is a water crisis going on, one that leaves the rich even richer and the poor even poorer, and those who cannot get clean water die from waterborne diseases, or starvation, or dehydration, or all or some combination of the above. Humanity has struggled to control nature, and while this has some immediate, short-term benefits, it has done far, far more harm than good. Again, this will resonate powerfully with readers who are aware of the possibility of such a crisis occurring in the world, or those who may have first-hand experience of such a crisis. One thing is clear in Habibi: if the earth dies, then it is most certainly humanity's fault for allowing greed to triumph.

And then there are the stories Dodola tells. A majority of them appear to be drawn from the Qur'an, and oftentimes Dodola includes a comparable Bible narrative, just to show how similar the primary books of Christianity and Islam are in reality. Given the source of these stories, any experience reading the Qur'an will help in appreciating both Dodola's stories and the main story itself, but it is not absolutely necessary. But this comparison between the Qur'an and the Bible is important in highlighting that the differences between Islam and Christianity - and indeed, in the races that subscribe to one or the other, or even to other faiths entirely - is so minor as to be unimportant. As Dodola realizes in a crucial moment towards the end ofthe novel: “There are no separations.”

All of what has been mentioned so far is well and good, but what makes Habibi unique from all the other novels and books that tackle the same themes, whether separately or together, is Thompson's art. Using Islamic art and calligraphy as the basis for the art of Habibi, Thompson tells a story, already beautiful on its own, using some of the most beautiful and intricate artwork to have appeared outside of the most elaborately-decorated Qur'ans and mosques. While some might like to argue that coloring the entire thing would heighten the beauty of the artwork, I believe that the stark black-and-white brushstrokes that are Thompson's trademark are beautiful enough precisely because they are so sharp and crisp. Part of the beauty of Islamic artwork is that it is based on the precise, mathematical lines of geometry, but softened by the elaborate arabesques and labyrinthine curlicues evolved through the Islamic artists' love of natural forms. This creates an intricate, layered imagery that draws the reader in, creating a fairytale-like sense of the story being told. This style, when applied to the main storyline, Dodola's stories, and then built up by the inclusion of Arabic calligraphy (not all of which is Thompson's; this is clarified in the endnotes), creates the feeling of having stepped into a dream, as it were: an exotic, beautiful dream, but also savage and uncomfortable for the truths it reveals to the reader.

Habibi is simple, and yet complex. It is a love story, and yet so, so much more than just that. It explores many things, both simple and complex, but more often than not, what seems simple is far more complicated and multilayered than what might appear on the surface, and what appears complex is really quite simple, when one gets down to it. Just like the Arabic latticework designs that constantly appear throughout the novel, and just like the examples of calligraphy scattered all throughout, Habibi is a beautiful and heartbreaking exploration of how the simplest things are always the most important, and provide the foundations of everything that is great and enormous in the world.