Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays edited by Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha

(McFarland, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

This baggy (43 essays, plus introductory and concluding material over nearly 400 pages) but important book is the brainchild of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF), an organisation established in 2012 with ambitions to reach out to and showcase the Arab/Muslim sf world. It has published a number of anthologies, but this seems to be the first major English-language publication attributed to the group. As such, it’s a work of amazing ambition and energy, some frustration, and great dedication.

With a book of this size, touching upon each contribution would be next to impossible, so any review would have to be selective. It is divided into several sections, containing historical round-ups, critical summaries, and interviews: North Africa, the Levant, Gulf States, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Far East, with a third section entitled ‘A Literature in Appraisal’ containing an interview with Rebecca Hankins, an American archivist who has published a great deal of interesting work on Islamic sf, an essay by Barbara K. Dick on the academic interest in Arab SF (her own Ph.D. is on the subject), and a piece reflecting upon her own experience in translating Arab sf by Areeg Ibrahim.

I said ‘baggy’; and this is a book which seems to have what are possibly conflicting aims: introducing the wide variety of sf which could come under the category of ‘Arab and Muslim’ and allowing the equally wide and often diasporic range of writers who identify with those categories to talk to each other. Some of the pieces are introduced by contextual general introductions on sf: an example here is Azrul Bin Jaini’s essay on Malaysian sf, which draws upon the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction and Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. Others, such as the Kuwaiti Naif Al-Mutawa and the Pakistani-American Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, draw upon their wide reading of ‘Western’ sf. Some nod to media-sf such as Star Wars or cartoons popular as imported product. Some, such as the Indonesian Riawani Elyta or the Mauritanian Moussa Ould Ebnou, see themselves as outliers in what we might call the ‘global conversation’ of sf. Others join it as academics (the Iranian Zahra Janessari-Ladani), publishers (Farkondeh Fazel Bahkshehi, also Iranian), or writers Mame Bougouma Diene (Franco-Senegalese-American). Many of course, such as Sami Ahmad Khan, who has published novels and major works of criticism and whose ‘The Indian Recipe for Good Science Fiction’ is one of a number of interesting interviews by the Egyptian SF Society, have feet in several ‘camps’. In contrast to those who see themselves as attempting to introduce fictional modes alien to their cultures, others, especially contributors from Egypt and other Muslim North African countries, are at pains to point out that science fiction and other branches of the fantastic are fundamental parts of the literary milieux in which they operate.

The ESSF seems to have done a marvellous job in tracking down contributors, some of whom even seem rather surprised to have been asked to take part in this project. There are writers from Bosnia, Turkey, post-USSR Central Asian states, as well as those previously mentioned. Interestingly, one state is significant by its absence. There is no mention of Saudi-Arabian sf such as HJWN by Ibraheem Abbas; a novel which was quite widely reviewed in British and American critical journals, and whose author has attended at least one World SF Convention.

Given the contexts within which many of the contributors are living and writing, the complex politics involved are alluded to. Some contributors have had significant involvement in political struggles in their countries, with jail sentences served and books banned. Shamil Idiatullin, a Russian Tatar journalist/novelist, writes from within post-Soviet Russia. Wajdi Muhammed Al-Ahdal, from war-torn Yemen, tells us that there are no publishing houses operating in his country of 30 million population. Afghan Abdulwakil Sulamal is one of several contributors writing from outside his country; the diasporic nature of such writing is particularly referenced in Ibrahim Al-Marashi’s contribution, subtitled ‘An Expatriate’s Pilgrimage to a Better Future’, in which he references the recent Comma Press anthology Iraq+100, to which he contributed, wondering whether his story would be accepted because he was ‘part of the Diaspora’. Perhaps the most interesting contribution in this context is Palestinian Emad El-Din Aysha’s ‘Exiled to the Future’, in which he sees sf’s visions of future-possibilities as important steps in actually creating a future-Palestine.

As might be expected, the amount of information presented varies considerably between each piece. Some are simple descriptions of the contributor’s own work. Manar Al Hosni, a young writer from Oman, presents a fascinating blueprint for her own planned work through an essay on djinn (what we in the West call ‘genies’) in Omani literature and folklore. It is entertaining and informative. Certainly, many contributors try to work out their own national or religious agendas, though (as might be expected) there is no unified ‘line’ even in what ‘Muslim’ science fiction might be expected to do. The overall sense is of exploration, of a rather hopeful conversation or set of conversations beginning within a disparate set of voices to whom the global term ‘Arab and Muslim’ might apply; conversations which, of course from a publishing house based in the West are also directed outwards. This is not a book which can be read monolithically all the way through from beginning to end, but it can be rewardingly skimmed and essays absorbed as they are engaged with. Production values are not always great (an important illustration on page 12 describing sf in Egypt from the 1950s is too blurred to be of any use). Coming out of it, with a sense that there really are important voices ‘out there’ whose work could teach us a lot, we are disappointed that there is no overall bibliography, though this would, of course have added significantly to the size and cost of a book which, sadly, is already far too expensive to be impulse-bought.

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.