Love Articles » Blog Archive » Zabibah and the King

Zabibah and the King

Cover of the post-capture English edition of the novel.

Zabibah and the King (زبيبة والملك, or Zabibah wal-Malik) is a novel, originally published anonymously in Iraq in 2000,

Contents

1 Plot summary
2 Footnotes
3 See also
4 External links

Plot summary

The plot is a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a beautiful commoner girl named Zabibah. Zabibah’s husband is a cruel and unloving man who rapes her. The book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, Hussein’s home town. Although the book is on the surface a romance novel, it is (and was intended to be read as) an allegory. The hero is Hussein and Zabibah represents the Iraqi people. The vicious husband is the United States and his rape of Zabibah represents the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

The book was a best-seller in Iraq when it was originally published for 1,500 Iraqi dinars (less than USD$1.00). It is estimated that over one million copies were sold.

An American businessman commissioned the book’s translation into English in 2004. Saddam Hussein received no money from sales of the English translation as the copyright is owned by the editor, Robert Lawrence. Two days after Saddam’s execution, an unabridged recital of the book in British Sign Language was uploaded to the video site YouTube. It was broken down into 122 sections but, due to terms of use violations, was removed less than 48 hours later.

Some

Footnotes

^ a b Ofra Bengio, “Saddam Husayn’s Novel of Fear”, 9 Middle East Quarterly 1, 2002.
^ Elaine Sciolino, “C.I.A. Sleuths Study a Novel for the Thinking of Hussein”, The New York Times, 24 May 2001.
^ a b Jonathan Earl Bowser, “The Artist and the Dictator”, www.jonathonart.com, accessed 4 November 2006.