United Arab Emirates / All works
Novel
شاهندة
Not translated into English
Rashid Abdallah al-Nuaimi · 1971
Synopsis
Shahinda, a girl of great beauty, is abducted with her parents by slave traders and sold. The novel follows her fate, at seventeen, among those who fight over possessing her, in the Emirates before oil, where sea and desert mingle. A love story into which epic and tale enter, the book depicts the slave trade and the condition of women on the Gulf coast.
Context
Published in 1971, when its author headed the Department of Information and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, the book is regarded as the first Emirati novel, and Adnan Hussein Ahmad, in Asharq al-Awsat in 2018, sees in it the starting point of the country's novel. Emarat Al Youm reports that it was widely read when it came out. The Department of Culture of Ajman devoted to it in 2009 a forum of fiction writing that bears its name.
Who it is for
For reading a founding novel of the Emirates, which shows slavery and the fate of women in the Gulf of former times.
Prizes and reception
Emarat Al Youm notes that it still stirs debate, more than fifty years after it came out.
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