Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 6

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

to find elements of the sacred that crossed normally impenetrable religious and sectarian barriers. Again and again, holiness seemed theologically
composite, and cruelty and love coexisted. Even deviance could be made to serve a purpose: sexual relations with children were interpreted as a
coming of age ritual.
Presumably the narrator ingests these stories and leaves Sarmada with them in his bones and his mind. Rather than cutting himself off from
tradition, he incorporates it. In so doing, he teaches us something important about the paradoxical connection between the assertions of the self and
the integrity of tradition.
Sarmada was the site of a battle during the Crusades, and now it is one of the staging grounds of the war against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Asad.
Fadi Azzam wants us to read his novel and think about what a so-called modern and rational political order has done to men and women who once
found their own, albeit imperfect, ways to live together.
Sarmada does not come with a set of causal explanations about the way things happen in history, nor with a pragmatic plan for shaping the course
of the future. And the fantastic fate Fadi Azzam invents for the people of Sarmada is a manifest violation of conventional notions of how things
happen in the real world. What is deeply instructive but troubling is that they are no more grotesque than the actual course of events. It is in this
sense that storytelling, with its linkages to tradition, becomes an authoritative way to challenge the political system and gives a vivid sense of why
men and women in Syria are today risking all they possess to be allowed to return to themselves and search for their own shared humanity.

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