Driven by Curiosity…

At the time where the disparity between the east and the west, or by two cultures shaped by two religions.. Islam and Christianity is at its maximum. …my hands fell on a book called Ali and Nino… Where these two worlds wed in a fascinating exotic fantasy, compared to Shehrazad’s narrations.

I have never heard of this book before, I picked it out when I was in Saudi among several other books I used to buy a bunch of English books, whenever they were available, simply because most of the good Arabic books were not there and there was no specific system to what you can find or when you can find it, actually I will never forget the dirty look I got when I asked the guy at Jarir book store for Ahlam Mustaghanemy books! Ifft he looked at me with so much disgust, telling me coldly that her books are banned! Looking at me from head to toe! and since my hair was not covered, i just wished i could disappear! before they call some mutawe3!

Anyway.. I found it recently among my unread books… I did not have high expectation from this book, but was totally and very pleasantly surprised. Once I started looking in the internet, I realized it is a an enchanting cross-cultural romance set just before the Russian Revolution in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city on the edge of the Caspian Sea. Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Muslim desert boy from an aristocratic family, has fallen in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Nino Kipiani, a Christian girl with distinctly European background. To be together, they had to fight scandals and blood feud…. Only to prove that true love can win at the end… I guess our dear Roba once discussed mixed marriages in one of her, and this is an idea of how a mixed marriage looks like. Another example of how mixed marriages look like could be found in the map of love by Ahdaf Soueif, which I did not appreciate as much as I have her other book in the eye of the sun which i feel has changed my life! and recommended it to Natasha with the same note she wrote me once if I believe books can change lives i should read the unbearable lightness of being …Of course these are not real people, but I do have examples of real people who live blissfully in a mexed marriage… only no one would find them interesting, because you do not know them!

What is even more interesting about this book is the confused background of the writer, an interesting man of several identities Kurban Said, Assad Bei and Lev Nussimbaum… who was born Jew, converted to Islam at 17 years and spent the next 15 years in Christian Europe! Lived his life fearless, and wrote what his passions dictated… And whose early death was considered a cultural loss….

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I am on a list of a mass email that received the picture of baby Thomas celebrating his second birthday. Thomas happened to be the son of an acquaintance that was working with me at some point in Germany. Sarah is a very attractive, successful 38 year old young lady She has been in several relationships throughout her life, but none of them ended up as she really hoped.

Between her family and her job, years passed and she woke up one day to find out that she is a38 year old single pregnant woman with a boyfriend who did not last more than couple of weeks… Sarah came to work devastated, and between the interesting mixed group we were, we went through a long back and fourth Islamic, Christian, Ahiest, socialist, middle eastern, European discussions about abortion and the baby’s right to live to help her decide whether she should keep the baby or not. These discussions lead to other discussions, the single mother thing, and how is she going to cope with it emotionally Society in Germany has tolerance for single mothers, it is not as scandalously looked upon as la sma7 Allah in our society. This has lead to another type of discussion and whether it is fair for the child to grow up without a father, we discussed in painful detail about the father’s right to know and to be part of the child’s life…The discussions ended with the biological woman’s clock. After all Sarah was 38, and even though she never thought about children seriously, this might have been her last and only chance to be a mother…

Sarah decided to have the baby. Thomas’ father did not want to be part of his life, and so Thomas is all hers. I don’t know where to start in describing my own feeling about all this… I know one thing though, when I saw what a beautiful and loved baby Thomas looks in his second birthday. How proud, satisfied and happy Sarah looks…. I feel there is something right about this….

I know this is still not a big issue in our society, but one of these days it will become… like many other things that were not accepted and are being accepted little by little.. I mean in Egypt this is already an issue through what they call “zawaj 3orfi”… which is really a different route to the same result…

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