Bahr Al-Zulumat (Sea of Darkness), Mahmoud Maher, Aseer Al Kotob Publishing, Cairo, 2024, pp.222
Europeans mistakenly thought at the time that whoever reached this sea would fall, since they believed that the Earth was flat.
It is the first time Maher moves beyond the Iberian Peninsula and the southern part of the Mediterranean Sea as settings, where many of his novels are set in Andalusian Spain and North African kingdoms.
Maher uses the flashback technique via Heda, a grandmother talking to her grandson in Morocco, through which the reader finds out that she was an heiress to the throne of the Taino people, one of the West Indies’ indigenous peoples, and that she fell in love with Malek, the grandson of King Abu-Bakr, a Muslim king who sailed from West Africa to these islands and gave enormous gifts made of gold to the natives. In return, they embraced Islam and made him their king.
In Genoa, Cristoforo Colombo (i.e. Christopher Columbus) sailed to Portugal to persuade its king to give him a ship to find a maritime western route to Asia and ultimately the Silk Road, thus evading taxes imposed by the Muslim world on Asian commodities sent to Europe.
In order to achieve this, he married an unattractive Portuguese noblewoman so that, through her brother, he could present his plan to the King of Portugal. When the Portuguese King didn’t respond favourably to his request, he kept humiliating his wife, driving her to commit suicide.
Immediately afterwards, he took a mistress and went on to persuade the Spanish Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to give him three ships and put them under his command.
During the voyage, sailors learned that Columbus was an evasive, treacherous liar. From the onset, it was evident that Martín Alonso Pinzón, a Muslim mariner and captain of the second ship, had the expertise and courage that enabled Columbus to reach his destination. (The author mentioned that Khashkhash ibn Saeed, an Arab navigator, succeeded in reaching America in 889 AD, six hundred years before Columbus.)
Upon setting foot on a West Indies island, Columbus exchanged beads for gold with the Taino people. When he didn’t find gold on an island, in what is now Cuba, he permitted his sailors to abduct Taino women at night and bring them back to the ships.
Luzariq (an Arabised form of the name Rodrigo), the third main character in the novel, knew that he was a Muslim through his parents, who were secretly practising Muslims.
Afterwards, Luzariq witnessed the burning of his father at the stake by the Castilians in Seville due to a false accusation. His Muslim mentor sent him to the Muslim ship captain Pinzón, who took him aboard the second ship sailing to the New Land.
On his second voyage, Columbus was accompanied by Bartolomé de las Casas, a clergyman who, being pure in heart, was appalled by what the sailors committed: murder, rape, and pillage. Maher pointed out that the West Indies’ indigenous people didn’t know the Spanish conquistadores' horses and considered them monsters.
They were peaceful people who knew nothing about warfare, and that was the point of weakness Columbus exploited to the utmost. Hence, they were helpless in resisting them.
Las Casas sent a letter to the Catholic monarch informing him of the atrocities committed by Columbus and his sailors and how these ruined his missionary efforts.
Columbus circumvented this letter by sending huge amounts of gold and five hundred indigenous people to be sold as slaves; two hundred died during the voyage, and the others died in Seville because they couldn’t withstand the cold climate.
Columbus’s men attacked the “Mogwana” kingdom, killing Heda’s mother, the queen, and also her father when he tried to defend her. The kingdom’s defeat was due to Bordom, the kingdom’s traitor priest, who kept persuading and insinuating to its people that the invaders were angels coming for their good. Heda fled to her lover, Malek, whom her mother had refused to let her marry.
Then the Catholic monarchs sent Francisco de Bobadilla, their viceroy, with many ships carrying a great number of soldiers to colonize more lands in the Americas and investigate accusations against Columbus.
Columbus was surprised to be stripped of his authority, imprisoned, and sent to Spain along with his brothers, apparently because he was Italian and not Spanish.
Meanwhile, Bobadilla followed a policy of brutally shedding the blood of the native population.
He even threatened Las Casas with imprisonment if he didn’t stop attempting to dissuade him from slaughtering hundreds of innocent people in order to get gold by any means, including digging graves and removing gold teeth from the dead.
Many of the Taino survivors joined Malek, who began to train them to fight the Spanish invaders, along with Luzariq, after Malek’s men helped him escape from prison. It transpired that Bobadilla’s soldiers were spared severe punishment for killing Muslims.
When Malek killed a number of Spanish invaders in an ambush, Bobadilla retaliated viciously after extracting Malek’s hideout from two captives whom he threatened to slaughter if they didn’t show him the hideout in the forest. Upon arriving there at night, Bobadilla burned down the huts while whole Taino families were inside.
Malek, Heda, Luzariq, and Buba, Malek’s confidant, escaped miraculously and found a boat, which they used to sail until they reached the shores of Morocco.
Maher used the third-person narration in the novel, which is composed of seven chapters.
One of the novel’s historical errors is Maher’s claim that the ship carrying Columbus was sunk by the Vikings in the 15th century, whereas the last Viking raid on Iberia occurred in the 11th century.
Another is the mention that Bartolomé de las Casas was a priest who came to the New World on one of Columbus’s voyages, whereas in fact, he was a colonist who participated in and witnessed massacres of natives. He became a priest later on and recounted the horrors of the conquistadores in a book.
Another mistake occurs when Heda asks Malek to teach her to ride a horse and then, after a very short time, rides alone during her escape.
As for character development, Luzariq was one-dimensional, always horrified by the Spaniards’ savage acts and dwelling on the tragedies of the Spanish Inquisition (of which his father was a victim).
The novel’s title has a double meaning: the first is the body of water separating Europe from the Americas, and the second implicitly points to the darkness of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Europeans after crossing the Atlantic.
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