They are sojourners all, pilgrims and passersby from different eras and areas: mortal men and women who are conscious of the finitude of life and tirelessly searching for immortality and meaning. In a narrative where the real embraces the fictitious, the characters find their inspiration in the life of Abu al-Abbas and his iconic mosque in the city of Alexandria. The characters, mostly historical, are a diverse lot: Europeans and black Africans, as well as indigenous Egyptians whose lives cover the 13th to the 20th century. They range from architects to poets, slaves to woman warriors, and a clever stroke of metafiction they include not only the writer herself but also, by extension, the reader. Young and old, coming from all walks of life, they travel by land and sea and even air. Often uprooted or dispossessed, these travelers attempt to transcend measurable distance and venture into the great beyond of space and time, expanding the boundaries of geography, philosophy, religion and ultimately existence itself.

The reader is invited to be a fellow custodian of the inimitable tales of yore. Thus the story begins an unravelling of threads surrounding the mosque of al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas, the most popular mosque in the city of Alexandria, named after a much maligned Andalusian Sufi sheikh. The shrine of the sheikh is the foundation, but the edifice itself was completed only in 1945 at the hands of the gifted Italian architect Mario Rossi.

The story of the man is the story of the mosque. Acquiring his name from his native Murcia in Spain, Ahmed al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas is on pilgrimage to Mecca which fate decrees is to be a journey of no return. A shipwreck that claims lives and drowns answers plunges the protagonist and the unsuspecting reader into a maelstrom of violent events. From Kairouan in Tunisia to Alexandria in Egypt, ports of call hardly ever prove to be safe havens. Little realizing that his brief but unhappy stay in Kairouan is only a portal and a prologue to the rest of his life, the sheikh flees from what proves to be a quagmire of self-righteousness, fanaticism, and social injustice to an Egypt that turns out to be more of the same. With the onslaught of the Seventh Crusade, namely the Battle of Mansoura (1259), he finds himself in the thick of fighting. This bloody engagement in real battle brings in its wake civil unrest and infighting as well as a load of petty jealousies, disaffections further compounded by the unremitting persecution of the godly man for his “heretical” ideas. Such public and private challenges are not only alleviated by the guidance of a spiritual guru but made bearable by a long-term romantic attachment to a Zeinab or a reincarnated Latifa, an equestrian warrior who doubles as a model wife and mother. Surrounded by alienation and injustice, the beleaguered sheikh finds solace in adopting an ascetic lifestyle and the total renunciation of the pleasures of life. This existence is tenaciously undergirded by his immovable faith, constant recital of Quranic verses, and repeated invocations of the Almighty.

The life of Abu al-Abbas can be summed up as a trajectory of many defeats and a few triumphs. Unwittingly creating many enemies among the rich and powerful, he becomes especially vulnerable when officialdom turns against him. Brutally pursued, stoned, jailed and humiliated, the fugitive sheikh finds sanctuary in one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, namely, the lighthouse of Alexandria, which significantly becomes his refuge and ultimate space of instruction.

This mega-narrative is stitched together from many mini-narratives: every tale of betrayal, oppression and injustice — social, religious or racial — is counterbalanced by its opposite. There are good and bad sheikhs, as well as good and bad disciples. There are victims and victimisers aplenty. This spin is a crisscross of narratives across cultures and across history. Though anchored by dates and key events, the narrative space is ultimately one of voices, at times even disembodied voices. The voices are of the quick and the dead, conglomerate voices fashioning storytelling into a cacophony echoing across continents and centuries.

The building of the mosque and the writing of the novel are both elegies to Abu al-Abbas. But if this is a posthumous act of veneration for the Andalusian sheikh, it is also a tribute to the timelessness of the aesthetic, from the architectural to the lyrical. Lyricism and aesthetic lacing define the text. Naturally, therefore, respects are also paid to the Italian poet of Alexandria, Ungaretti (1888-1970), who along with Mario Rossi  represents the inextricable ties between East and West.

The theme of pilgrimage undergirds the story of Alexandria’s most popular mosque and unites us all, because pilgrims we all are. Reader and writer alike are almost coerced onto this crowded canvas depicting the confusion and bafflement of the microcosm and macrocosm of existence. In their diversity the characters become a matrix of all humanity in its perpetual search for meaning. Inevitably, therefore, writer and reader alike are sucked into a narrative embedded with a pan-human vision.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly