Syria: In Praise of Hatred, by Khaled Khalifa

This novel is set in the 1980s at the time of an uprising in Syria against Bashar al Assad's father, Hafez. The nameless teenage narrator lives in Aleppo with her three aunts Maryam, Marwa and Safaa. As hostilities escalate, she becomes increasingly involved with the Muslim brotherhood, an organisation of hard-line Sunni fundamentalists (referred to in the novel as "our sect") violently opposed to the ruling Alawite minority, and their brutal methods of imprisonment, torture and executions.

Many passages of the novel describe the narrator's state of mind, rather than events - her thoughts, perceptions, and visions. This makes for more challenging reading than a more action led plot. In the first part she often transits seamlessly between describing actual scenes and describing what are obviously mystic visions, so that I found it hard to follow the context of some of these visions. I also found it difficult to understand just why, initially, she felt that hatred was necessary, and that the only way to prevail against the "other sect" was to kill all their sons. Later, as violence becomes entrenched in the everyday life of Aleppo, there appears to be no going back for either side, and the path that she is on leads inevitably to disaster.

There is a wide range of viewpoints expressed, however, in the other characters in the story, some of whom believe still in the tolerance that Syria was historically renowned for, while others pursue pleasure more than religion. Besides the three aunts, there are parents, uncles, younger brothers, and others brought into the family by marriage. The narrator herself appears conflicted between the demands of religion and the demands of her body - despite her efforts to renounce her body, the novel is full of many passages of erotic sensuality.

The narrator, in the end, finds it hard to sustain the hatred that has fuelled her actions, after some years in prison:

"How hard it is to spend all your time believing what others want you to believe; they choose a name for you which you then have to love and defend, just as they choose the God you will worship, killing whoever opposes their version of His beauty, the people you call 'infidels'. Then a hail of bullets is released, which makes death into fact."

Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 near Aleppo, Syria. The novel was first published secretly in Damascus, but was discovered by the regime after forty days, and was banned. It was published in Lebanon in 2008, and shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It was translated by Leri Price and published by Transworld Publishers, a division of Random House, in 2012.