Mansour's Eyes by Ryad Girod, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

A friend's public execution triggers an ambitious look at the breakup of the modern Arab world. Mansour El Djezairi is on his way to his public execution. As his faithful friend Hussein looks on, the crowd calls for his head. Gassouh! Gassouh! It is a time when age-old rituals play out amid skyscrapers and are replayed on smartphone screens in the air-conditioned corridors of shopping malls. Set over the course of a single day in the Saudi Arabian capital, Mansour's Eyes weaves together several historical pasts: the time of Mansour's great-grandfather, the Emir Abdelkader; that of Algerian independence; and that of another Mansour, Mansur Al-Hallaj, a Sufi mystic executed in 922. In this lyrical and ambitious novel, Ryad Girod looks at the post-Arab Spring world as its drive toward modernity threatens to sever its relationship with the ethos of Sufi thought and mysticism. | Mansour's Eyes by Ryad Girod, Paperback | Indigo Chapters