Sometimes I add a very specific book to my TBR list, complete with ISBN and the source of the recommendation or the reason for my curiosity.

Sometimes there’s a name added to the list, with no context or details. That’s how it was with Dunya Mikhail, so I started with the books that were most readily accessible from the library.

The first I read is The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq. It’s translated from the Arabic, by the author with Max Weiss.

(For context, Weiss previously translated Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire—also essential reading. And, n North America, The Beekeeper‘s published by New Directions, who’s also responsible for Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy in these parts.)

When it arrived, I realised that I must have written down Mikhail’s name as part of reading to expand my understanding of the post-October-7th conflict between Hamas and Israel. It’s an excellent place to begin if you, also, want to understand more about Jihadism and how its adherents are different than ordinary Muslims—which is a little like saying that you want to understand how evangelicals, actively fighting in the war for souls, are different from ordinary Christians.

Mikhail opens with her teaching the Arabic alphabet, specifically the letter ‘n’, which is written like a semi-circle on its back and a dot centred above—like a star above a fallen crescent moon. It’s the character that Daeshi (another jihadist group, like Hamas, fighting for the Islamic State) write in red on people’s doors—infidels’ doors they would say—giving them 24 hours to leave their homes and all their belongings. N for Nasara, Christians.

She doesn’t share her thoughts with her students who, she thinks, are “too delicate to hear how young ladies were sold in warehouses after being inspected like watermelons—buyers would select the ones they wanted after smelling the girls carefully.”

But, inwardly, she remembers Nadia: a 28-year-old Kurdish woman she had interviewed (with the help of an Arabic translator) after Nadia escaped from Daeshi jihadi captivity to Iraq. N for Nadia, who was married with children and left with her husband as instructed; they were later surrounded by Daeshi fighters and captured.

She and her children (aged six, five, and one) were brutally schooled in and forced to “convert” to Islam with the other “infidels” in a camp, hungry and thirsty, and where her children were beaten in front of her. Then she was sold for about 100,000 dinars—about $85 American—and “married” to a jihadi, who raped her in front of them. Three months later, allied with another woman (and her two children) and, with the assistance of the community’s baker and one of her cousins, they escape while the men are briefly away to fight.

The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award in the U.S. (published by Simon & Schuster) whereas The Bird Tattoo is fiction, a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It, too, opens with the sale of a woman, but it’s not written in a journalistic tone.

The sentences are short and the language spare, but there are moments of lyricism. “She felt the presence of [her husband] all around her. Like threads stitched on an embroidered canvas, her life was seamed with the color of his absence.”

The jacket copy references Elif Shafak, and it’s clearly political and powerful like Shafak’s writing (Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad are also highlighted). But I was reminded more of novels by Khaled Hosseini—especially A Thousand Splendid Suns, set in Afghanistan and focussing on girls’ and women’s lives—with the emphasis on story and a strong throughline.

From a narrative perspective, The Bird Tattoo is immediately and consistently engaging; readers are drawn into Helen’s story immediately and invested in the idea of her escape, haunted by the details of her everyday life with the jihadists. From a publishing perspective, it’s a page turner.

From an historical perspective, it’s revealing: readers can readily visualise the scenes, whether populated by jihadis’ ordinary speech about camp “work” assignments alongside scenes of cooking eggplant in the kitchen belonging to one of a series of “husbands”. From an educational perspective, it’s an invitation.

Mikhail’s fiction allows readers to imagine how she distinguishes between her homeland in Iraq (Helen’s love of flowers abundant in her homeland, the letter F for fig, her spelling of l-o-v-e) and what it’s become with the rise of Jihadism. (She worked as a journalist and translator after graduating in Baghdad, but fled to Jordan and then America, when faced with interrogation.)

Fiction like hers allows all of us to move towards a greater understanding of the intricate power dynamics behind the headlines, behind statements designed to provoke your interest (in a world where news is paid for via advertisers rather than subscriptions to a daily paper delivered to doorsteps), phrases designed to secure the click rather than to inform, to encourage comprehension, or to reward critical thinking.

Mikhail’s writing, fiction and non-fiction, offers a different perspective on the challenges of confronting an ideology, characterised by violence, inherently oppositional to “western values” wherein women are not sold, husbands are not murdered, and people choose whether to believe or how to believe in religion.

We can see, in literature, how longstanding grassroots movements towards freedom might be coopted by the jihadis’ goals, how resistance fighters might believe that an alliance with jihadis could be a step toward freedom because both groups seek to overthrow existing power structures (how there would be inner debates about the costs and benefits of that alliance), and how ordinary people trying to live their lives outside of this conflict get caught in the snare.

Of course there are many books one can read to gain this kind of understanding, and here are only two of them, by a writer whose name was scribbled on a single line in my notebook, until that translated into two library loans. (This post has been written to coincide with Rebecca’s #LoveYourLibrary event, marking the last Monday of each month.) Next, maybe I’ll try for her first translation into English, a book of poetry. Or, maybe you have another suggestion?

What have you been reading recently that’s added to your understanding of human conflict and reconciliation, war and resistance, loss and restoration?