Sometimes you must write the book you want to read. In the afterword to her debut novel Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed remembers growing up with The Arabian Nights as “a cultural touchstone” while always “wanting more of her”. The “her” is, of course, Shaherazade, the teller of life-prolonging fantastical tales.
In the original and in Ahmed’s loose adaptation of The Arabian Nights, or Alf Layla wa Layla, Shaherazade marries a murderous ruler, who is reeling from the discovery of his first wife’s infidelity. Each night, he takes a new bride only to execute her the next morning. To stem this bloodshed and save her own life, Shaherazade tells stories that always pause on a cliffhanger. From her wedding night on, she stays the hand of death with the promise of what happens next.
Jamila Ahmed always wanted to read “a book where Shaherazade herself was spotlit, where her mind and machinations were front and center, where the historical world she would have occupied was palpable.” Ultimately, she wrote Every Rising Sun to be that book, placing her heroine in the world of the 12th century Seljuk Empire. While the original launches almost immediately into the tales told by Sheherazade, which are interspersed with minimal repetitive dialogue between Shaherazade and her husband, Ahmed’s novel is primarily about the character Shaherazade, and only secondarily focused on the tales she tells. In the narrative about Shaherazade, Ahmed explores her interior world, her doubts and passions, while weaving a historically-inspired plotline involving the Third Crusade and the Oghuz conquest of Kirman, capital of the Seljuk Empire.

The main protagonist of the stories told by Ahmed’s Shaherazade is named Jahaura. I wanted more of her. Although Shaherazade and her alter-ego Jahaura are both, in the end, crafted by Ahmed, the latter is the more compelling character because her world is suffused with magic. We meet, for instance, an angelic talking parrot and we follow Jahaura through a portal to an enchanted snow kingdom:
Jahaura, Kushyar, and the parrot slid into the new world on their backs, headfirst. The boat had disappeared somewhere in between. The first thing Jauhara noticed was the grass she was lying on, plush and verdant. She curled her fingers through the supple blades. The second thing she noticed was the snowcapped mountains arching so high that they covered the whole sky in stark white. No, the mountains were the sky. Red-roofed houses and cows and goats and asses hung upside down, dotting the snow above. A flurry fell on her nose. Jahaura could not tell who was above and who below.
This snow globe of an alternate universe evokes wonder. But the historical world that Ahmed’s Shaherazade occupies is steadfastly realist. Realism can have its own magic, but I fear the author placed too many constraints on Shaherazade’s story as she pursued fidelity to her chosen historical setting. As Ahmed explains in the afterword:
… because of the dearth of accurate portrayals about this period, it was important for me to be assiduous and circumspect as I created Shaherazade’s world. I spent years researching the Seljuks, that period, and the regions covered in the book, relying on chronicles, medieval histories, architecture, art, literature, and modern secondary sources to create an immersive world that did not run on stereotypes and assumptions but rang as true as possible.
I appreciate this deep research and the opportunity to learn about an understudied history through fiction. But one can combat stereotypes without being quite so “circumspect”, and without resorting, as Ahmed does, to ornamenting the narrative with a surfeit of adjectives, particularly colors. Ahmed describes “a land of green pistachios”, “silver bells”, a “glittering robe of vermillion and jade”, “necklaces of gold, earrings of emerald”, a “palm-green robe”, “turquoise tiled arches”, “silver and gold lanterns”, a “silver mirror” and “a stray scarlet thread”, all in the first two pages of the novel. Overall, Jahaura’s journey through the book comes with more storytelling and less description.
Shaherazade realizes what her gift can do for her early in the novel. “Something foreign flushes through me,” writes Ahmed. “I struggle to place the feeling until I realize it is power, small and startling, this ability to captivate with my tales—and achieve my ends.” There is power in storytelling, even the power of life and death. Jamila Ahmed is an author poised to cultivate this power past the circumspection of her first book. Like Shaherazade’s audience, I am eager to know what comes next.
Elizabeth Lawrence is Associate Professor of History at Augustana College.
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