This clever work never shies away from considering the philosophical and theological ramifications of technology in the Arab world.
#BOOK OF JINNS ZIP#
Wilson navigates this cultural mix with aplomb and produces a thoughtful, fast-paced novel, a post-9/11 Arab fantasy for Anglophone readers that includes a zip drive blessed by a blind dervish.
The book’s secrets force Alif and his childhood friend and neighbor Dina-a lower-class girl whose decision to wear niqab is presented as an act of defiant dignity-to enter the novel’s unseen world, where they encounter Abu Ghraib–like prisons as well as jinn trapped in cola bottles. Intisar sends Alif a rare book called Alf Yeom wa Yeom, or The Thousand and One Days, in order to keep it away from the Hand. 1 Yet he is quickly drawn into an ideological and theological power struggle. Alif himself is “more Han Solo than hacktivist,” as Elizabeth Hand has noted, willing to provide server space and support to “Islamists, anarchists, secularists-whoever asks” and pays. His invention draws the attention of the Hand, a shadowy government force that has imprisoned and tortured some of Alif’s clients.
After a bad break-up with Intisar, an upper-class girl engaged by her father to a government functionary, Alif creates a program that can identify anyone through an analysis of a corpus of their online writing. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab world to take ownership of their society?Īlif is a hacker and a programmer, half Arab and half Indian, who lives in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed Middle Eastern city in an unnamed security-state emirate.
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