A chronicler of the chimeric, the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez Eldin has been celebrated in the Arab world for her feverish, fanciful plots. To read her feels like opening one’s eyes into a fugue state, a landscape in which the parameters of reality seem just slightly off-kilter. The air, in her universe, is always abuzz with ethereal presences and diaphanous bodies, anticipating the propitious moment for revelation. For someone so tuned to the monstrous and the ghostly, it’s unsurprising that Ez Eldin’s range of references encompasses everything from Arab-Islamic folklore and A Thousand and One Nights to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. Born in the Nile Delta and trained as a journalist, she now works as an editor at the cultural weekly Akhbar al-Adab—a background that has perhaps primed her for the dizzying hall-of-mirror densities of intertextual allusion that characterize her inventive oeuvre.
The Orchards of Basra, which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2021, pursues the surreal and the hallucinatory with obsessive intensity. Though numerous stories of Ez Eldin’s have been published in online journals and anthologized, this is only the second of her novels to be rendered into English. Now available in Paul Starkey’s smooth and accessible translation, the book takes as its premise a recurring dream that hounds the modern-day protagonist, Hisham Khattab, as if it possesses a demonic, vengeful animacy. Within this dream-vision, angels descend to pluck all the jasmine flowers of Basra, denuding the city’s bushes. Despite its penchant for repetition, the imaginary vignette might have passed unremarked by Hisham, if it were not traceable to an entry in the monumental dictionary of dream interpretation that came to be (falsely) attributed to the eighth-century imam Ibn Sirin. The key to the cipher: jasmine may denote happiness, despair, chagrin, or religious scholars. In the specific configuration encountered by Hisham, jasmine could also herald the impending exodus—or perhaps even the demise—of the city’s scholars and jurists.
Such a resplendent and apparently arbitrary range of possible significations is, in fact, highly typical of the Arab-Islamic tradition of oneiromancy. Take the section on urination in Ibn Sirin: while the act of urination per se, in the fog of a dreamscape, might signify the illicit squandering of money or marriage to someone incompatible, urinating into the sea could mean paying taxes. Urinating into a valley, on the other hand, could be a harbinger of more offspring. Consider this passage, in which Malik, the dream interpreter in The Orchards of Basra, describes his shape-shifting craft:
I see a nightingale, and in it I see a gentle, elegant woman. I see an ascetic in a bat, and in a bird a deceitful man. A hoopoe confronts me, and I think of a man who is proficient in his work but irreligious. A dove stands on the orange tree next to my hut and my mind turns her into a good woman, or fresh news, and a prophet and a book. I am not frightened by the desert, even when I venture into it with no guide, for in my eyes, it is victory and profit and prosperity.
Not only are gestures and occurrences not isolable in straightforward ways, they must also be considered alongside an entire constellation of potential scenes, many of which defy credulity in their outlandish specificity. Etymological affinity, too, is frequently adduced as a logic for particular meanings: the first part of the Arabic word for “jasmine,” for instance, refers to renunciation and desperation, which perhaps goes some way toward accounting for its semiotic kinship with forlornness and foreboding.
Not for nothing did dream interpretation demand a thorough familiarity with the Arabic language—often regarded as the province of the erudite elect. It also required comprehensive knowledge of the Qur’an, since dreams can be divinely inspired within an Islamic cosmological worldview; a well-known Prophetic hadith states that “The visionary dream of a pious believer is one of forty-six parts of prophecy.” The Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi likened sleep to a barzakh, an isthmus situated between the living and the dead, in which one’s soul can temporarily depart from one’s body to commune with other errant souls. One devoutly disposed might even dialogue with the Prophet, as the fifteenth-century Algerian Sufi Muhammad al-Zawawi claimed to have done in his dream journal. True awakening, in this paradigm, is only possible in sleep, that condition that simulates and prepares one for the threshold of death. Yet, at the same time, such a receptivity to intimations of the otherworldly translates into vulnerability: no one can guarantee in advance that their dream perceptions aren’t occasioned by Satan. The gamut of Arabic words for dreams, from ru’ya to hulm, indexes Islamic anxieties over their truth value, and their capacity for predicting the future or guiding the believer’s worldly conduct.
Though Ibn Sirin tends to be held up as the forefather of dream interpretation, the dictionary that bears his mark was in fact assigned to him retrospectively, without its authenticity having been attested—so much did his proper name subsequently become synonymous with the art, that prestige and authority could be garnered by simple forgery. Little is known of his personality and career as an oneiromancer. Even within the brief entry on jasmine from which Ez Eldin weaves her labyrinthine tale, the narrative of the dream is first recounted to Al-Hasan al-Basri (Ibn Sirin’s contemporary, himself a renowned theologian and ascetic) by an unnamed man. Al-Basri then decodes its hidden sense for his own benefit, before presumably telling it to Ibn Sirin. These overlapping and convoluted layers of transmission confound the illusion of single authorship; enigma is tangled up in the dream’s very origins.
All this knotty context deserves to be stressed, at risk of pedantry, for what emerges throughout The Orchards of Basra is how fragile and prone to disintegration the borders of identity are. Through the indeterminate space opened up by the oneiric, Hisham comes into contact with a parallel life led by Yazid ibn Abih, a commoner living in seventh- and eighth-century Basra. His “human” existence mingles with that of his “paper being”; soon the sights and scents of Umayyad Iraq acquire the forceful immediacy of flesh-and-blood reality for Hisham. Words like “alter ego,” “past self,” and “doppelgänger” feel too pallid and slight to encapsulate the migration of Yazid’s memories into Hisham’s mind, along with the collapsing of temporal demarcations and the intrusive simultaneity with which history materializes itself in Ez Eldin’s artfully discombobulating fiction. Structurally, too, the text shuttles between eras and characters, displacing us from one body to the next, almost as though adhering to the loose associations conjured by a dream. It slips with facility from one register to another, gliding from a more colloquial lilt in the Cairo chapters to the ornate, mannered, and often devotionally inflected vocabulary that permeates the Basra chapters. Arriving from an unfixable and anonymous elsewhere, the dream functions, for Ez Eldin, as an orienting topos by which consciousness and time can be stretched beyond their limits, and agency obfuscated beyond simplistic notions of guilt and blame.
For who ought to be responsible for what a dream foretells, if it comes true? And, by extension, on what scale should responsibility itself be measured given that God, from whose knowledge “not even the smallest grain escapes,” dictates the course of creation from start to finish? What fate would befall the sinning believer in the hereafter, someone who nominally subscribed to the faith but committed grave crimes in the earthly realm? These questions, which were actual preoccupations in the Umayyad intellectual milieu’s theological disputations, loom over the novel.
Real historical personages—from al-Hasan al-Basri, the aforementioned character in Ibn Sirin’s tome, to Wasil ibn ‘Ata’, a disciple of al-Basri who famously broke off from his master to found the rationalist school of the Mu’tazila—float in and out of the story’s peripheries, evincing the depths of Ez Eldin’s learning and love for the premodern textual tradition. One is tempted to call The Orchards of Basra classical Arabic fan fiction, so wholly does Ez Eldin indulge the fantastical headcanon that she fleshes out on the basis of one paltry sketch in an oneiromancer’s dictionary. But perhaps the more profound force of the text lies in the dimension and solidity that it lends to otherwise marginal and invisible lives. Much of what comes down to us in the Arabic corpus is unsurprisingly restricted to a privileged scholarly class that had access to education and transregional mobility; it is easy to overlook the regrets, impulses, and neuroses of ordinary folks, whose experiences are beyond the reaches of the archive.
Hisham, the hero of the novel, might be a stand-in for Ez Eldin herself: he is described as enamored of ancient manuscripts, collecting and selling them for a living; he has an eidetic memory for classical Arabic poetry, theology, and philosophy that astonishes his teachers. His mania for the words of his predecessors breeds in him a feeling of rootlessness and dislocation from his own present, accentuated by his good-for-nothing father’s abandonment of their family. Nagged at by a superstitious mother who treats him as a layabout squandering his time on futile pursuits, Hisham finds sanctuary in friendship with a well-read ex-sheikh and desire for a girl who happens to be clutching a copy of Ibn Sirin’s compilation. The former, left nameless and known only as the “beloved heretic,” ekes out his days in lonely solitude after having been demonized by the mainstream religious establishment for his deviant Marxist writings. The latter, on the other hand, appears all but instrumental in her gendered function, seeming to exist only to facilitate Hisham’s epiphanies and spur in him more vivid dream-visions. Together, both figures mirror, in miniature, the internecine scholarly fractures and murderous, lustful impulses that govern the parallel plot of eighth-century Basra.
In that alter-chronology, Yazid—a weaver of palm leaves by day—partakes in the hermetic study circles of Al-Hasan al-Basri and Wasil ibn ‘Ata’, and listens to debates on predestination and free will. We soon discover that these disagreements do not represent mere ivory-tower abstractions, but concretize pressing everyday anxieties about what it means to embody piety in relation to the mysteries of the afterlife. When we first encounter Yazid’s voice in the manuscript he has left behind as a ledger of his sins, it speaks from the aftermath of catastrophe, surveying the ruin inflicted by a lethal plague that decimates the Basran population. The immensity of the loss echoes the societal malaise already presaged by that “old dream” identical to Hisham’s, of angels gathering up bushels of jasmine.
It turns out that Yazid, while gifted with clairvoyant dream-visions that bring him “close to the status of a prophet,” lacks the skills to interpret them. Thus he relies on his friend, the copyist Malik, whose boundless hermeneutic and exegetical knowledge is matched only by his utter inability to dream—his sleep is “a series of unconscious spells, from which I wake like someone returning to the dead.” Between them, secrets are kept and jealousies unarticulated, thickening into lascivious and bloodthirsty betrayals that feel preordained by the time they happen. One falls “prisoner” to the other’s grip. Each shift of narrator between chapters gradually discloses a drama of seduction and politicking in a vein reminiscent of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, making all of Basra appear as a massive crime scene—littered with corpses, but without a clear perpetrator.
At the end of the day, does one survive because “the hand of fate had inscribed him in the list of those to be saved”? If so, what store can we set by conscious ethical action or, for that matter, the unconscious figments that arrive unbidden on the shores of slumber? The primordial and far-reaching philosophical questions posed by The Orchards of Basra are belied by its propulsive subplots, the dense entanglements of the sorrows it charts, the semiotic mesh of images that overlay the text. Yet they are no less essential for the sublimated form in which they come packaged.
And perhaps it is this capacity for displacement and condensation, this unbounded potential for granting the imaginary a corporeal shape, that renders literature so akin to the space of a dream. For what does the dream foreground, in all its contradictions and impossibilities, if not the very problematic of reading? Probe as one might, the words and vignettes elude interpretive fixity. Even Sigmund Freud, who devoted reams of paper to theorizing the dream as a fulfillment of inexpressible wishes and desires, had to admit that every dream has a “navel,” a nexus where it “reaches down into the unknown.” It is in that umbilical darkness, perhaps, that The Orchards of Basra and its vision of the world reside.
Copyright © 2025 by Alex Tan. All rights reserved.
