Cities of Salt, a trilogy, is Abdelrahman Munif's latest. Thus far, only the first two volumes have appeared in Arabic; the third is expected any time. The Arabic title of the first volume. Al-tih, means "the wilderness"; that of the second volume, Al-ukhdud, "the excavation"; and the third volume, Taqasim al-layl Washington-al-nahar, "divisions of night and day." The English translation of the first volume has been published by Random House under the title of the whole, namely Cities of Salt.
The trilogy recounts the story of the emergence of cities in the Arabian Peninsula as the result of the discovery of oil during the first half of this century. Although the fictitious kingdom in which the action takes place remains unnamed in the novel, it is clear from the preponderant correspondence between the imaginative and the historical accounts that it is Saudi Arabia.
The first volume covers the period from the discovery of oil in the early thirties to the death of the founder of the fictitious kingdom, Sultan Khraibet. (This corresponds to the reign of King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the present Saudi dynasty, who died in 1953.) The next volume parallels the reign of King Khazael, Khraibet's eldest son, which ends with his overthrow by his younger brother. (This corresponds to the reign of King Saud, Abd al-Aziz's successor, who was overthrown by his younger brother Faisal in 1964.) The final volume is expected to extend from 1964 to the present.
Since the narrative of Cities of Salt consciously evokes the history of present-day Saudi Arabia, it is important to keep the general outline of that history in mind while reading the novel. Very briefly, the roots of the Saudi monarchy go back to the middle of the eighteenth century. At that time, the ancestor of the Saudis who wielded political power in major parts of Arabia formed an alliance with a religious reform movement known as Wahhabiyya. This movement was so extreme in its puritanical interpretation of Islam that it advocated and practiced war against other Muslims whom it considered infidels. Armed with this strict Wahhabi doctrine, the Saudis repeatedly attacked Syria, Iraq, and Palestine during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it was only at the beginning of this century that a Saudi ruler could bring the diverse parts of Arabia under his control and impose on the population the hybrid of Wahhabi religious doctrine and Saudi political rule. This was accomplished by Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, who founded the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and signed the oil concessions with American oil companies in 1933. The present ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Fahd, is one of Abd al-Aziz's many son's.
Immediately after its publication in Beirut in 1984, Cities of Salt was banned in Saudi Arabia. The reason for the ban is the sustained challenge the novel presents to the official Saudi version of the nature of the Saudi monarchy and of the genesis and development of cities in the Arabian desert. The names of the fictional kings illustrate the author's attitude toward the actual kings whom he satirizes in the fictional account. Thus Khraibet, the name of the founder of the fictional kingdom, means, "the confused one," while Khazael, the name of his eldest son and successor, is a play on a cognate that means "moody."
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