The Map of Love

Ahdaf Soueif

I picked this one up because the combination of the title and the author's name sounded so beautiful. It begins with a meeting between two women, an American, Isabel Parkman, and an Egyptian, Amal al-Ghamrawi. Isabel brings with her a chest filled with journals, letters, mementoes from her great-grandmother, Lady Anna Winterbourne. It turns out that Lady Anna was married to Sharif al-Baroudi, who is, in turn, the granduncle of Amal. Together, Amal and Isabel try to piece together the Lady Anna's story and the narrative shifts between the lives of Amal and Isabel in the late 1990s, and the life of Lady Anna in Egypt during the early 1900s while it was still under British Occupation. The plot of the story is driven along by the romance between Anna and Sharif, their subsequent marriage, and the political events that shape their lives together.

The romance in this story seemed implausible at times, yet it was lyrically written so that it was easy to suspend disbelief and just be transported by the story. But the most impressive aspect of this book is not the love story but its historical aspects. For the author seamlessly weaves the views of the participants on the British occupation of Egypt, as well as the feelings of modern-day Egyptians and Arabs on the attitudes of the Western world towards the Middle East. Here, I was given the opportunity of seeing their world from their point of view, from the pen of someone who understands and loves the land. I saw the Egyptian world with different eyes and most importantly, I was gently pointed towards another viewpoint of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But through it all, I did not feel that the story was a harangue on the evils of the Western world, or a moral lecture on the injustices that have been suffered. Neither did she feel that terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism were the ways forward for the Arab world. Perhaps the author was trying to illuminate Egyptian culture and to try to correct the prevalent impression of Arabs as fundamentalists and terrorists. If so, I think she made a fine start.