His novels have repeatedly circled this inquiry, whether through the labyrinths of political power, the seductions of art, or the intimate betrayals of love. Yet in
The Eighth Heaven, Salmawy pushes this question into its starkest terrain. He offers a story that begins in quiet privilege and ends in collective catastrophe, tracing not only a woman’s personal transformation but also a writer’s evolving understanding of what literature must confront in an age of permanent crisis.
Salmawy does not write from the position of the detached observer. He is explicit that the novel grew out of emotional shock rather than abstract calculation. “Writing, at its core, is a creative act that does not submit to a clear equation,” he says. “But there is no doubt that the Palestinian cause and the latest war stirred my emotions powerfully. A simple news item in a newspaper was the spark that pushed me to write this novel.” From that spark emerges Iman, a heroine whose life appears calm, stable, even enviable, yet is inwardly barren. She spends her days playing bridge, drifting through social rituals, and when asked about this existence she replies bluntly: “I kill time.” The phrase becomes a quiet confession of spiritual exhaustion.
This exhaustion is not accidental. Salmawy constructs Iman as a woman who once loved deeply but failed herself at a decisive moment. Her beloved, Omar, was a strong man who “knew his path,” as Salmawy describes him. She depended on him for everything; he chose the direction, she followed. But when circumstances required her to take a decision alone, she found herself incapable. “If he had forced her to choose, she would have gone along with him completely,” Salmawy explains. “But he told her it was a decision she had to make by herself. She could not do it then. She would only find that strength twenty years later.” That delayed strength, he adds, is born from Gaza. “The war is what finally gave her the power to take the decision she once failed to make.”
Love, in Salmawy’s conception, is not merely an emotion but a dynamic force. “We draw our strength from those we love,” he writes, and in conversation he insists that this sentence captures the novel’s core. Love is the engine of Iman’s journey, but it is not romanticized. At first it is a source of weakness; later it becomes a source of courage. “Love, in its ordinary form, is based on worldly emotions between two lovers,” Salmawy says. “But the idea the novel proposes is the elevation of love when it becomes connected to sacrifice for the sake of the national cause.”
This elevation is embodied in the novel’s most resonant symbol: the “eighth heaven.” Omar tells Iman that beyond the seven heavens commonly spoken of lies an eighth level, where love ascends beyond the personal and becomes bound to الوطن—the homeland. “Omar reaches this level when he is martyred in Gaza,” Salmawy explains, “and Iman reaches it when she decides to volunteer to serve Palestinian children there. That is where their meeting takes place: in the eighth heaven.”
The novel’s final scene condenses this philosophy into a single gesture. Asked about the wounded child she is carrying and what name she wants to give him, Iman answers: Omar. Salmawy describes this as a symbol with multiple layers. “There are two levels here. One is continuity—the idea that those who leave us do not truly disappear. The other is the bond between Egypt and Palestine. The Palestinian boy takes his name from the Egyptian doctor. Omar is an Arab name that belongs equally to the Egyptian and the Palestinian. The Arab dimension is very clear in the novel, and so is the human dimension.”
Salmawy is adamant that Palestine, as it appears in The Eighth Heaven, is not confined to geography. “The Palestinian cause in the novel is not linked to Gaza alone. It is an all-encompassing Arab cause,” he says. “Before Gaza there was Syria and Lebanon, and after it came Yemen. It is the cause of Arab will confronting attempts at foreign domination over the destiny of the Arab world and efforts to fragment its states to weaken a strength that can only exist through unity.”
The novel also engages directly with contemporary political anxieties inside Egypt. Salmawy includes a warning about the continued presence of Islamist networks beneath the surface of society. Quoting the heroine’s mother, he notes: “They fell from power, but they are still among us.” The figure of a Brotherhood-affiliated contractor who boasts of his ability to demolish a historic villa for profit is deliberately symbolic. “The villa, with its special architecture, represents part of our heritage,” Salmawy says. “He wants to destroy it to build an apartment block for material gain. Even the idea of demolition itself is symbolic.”
Yet Salmawy repeatedly returns to the idea that politics alone does not make a novel. “Everything we have spoken about is political,” he acknowledges, “but the novel—and literature in general—its primary material is human emotion.” Political causes gain their value when they move these emotions, when they enter the intimate space of fear, love, guilt, and hope.
Structurally, The Eighth Heaven unfolds across two parallel timelines. “There is a forward-moving time that begins with Iman reading the newspaper and ends with her entering Gaza,” Salmawy explains. “And there is another time that returns to the past, to her love story with Omar since their university days, then to her departure abroad and her marriage. Each has its own stations, and they meet at the final climax in the crossing into Gaza.”
Salmawy chose not to include a dedication. “If I were to write one,” he says, “I would dedicate it to the entire Arab nation.” He recalls the “majestic scene” of aid convoys entering through Rafah, when it seemed as if each bus erased the line between Egyptian Rafah and Palestinian Rafah, turning them into a single Arab city.
Perhaps the most striking feature of The Eighth Heaven is its refusal of despair. Iman does not save Gaza. She does not change history. But she changes herself. And for Salmawy, this is no small matter. “The novel depends on the writer’s ability to turn an idea into part of the lives of the characters—how it affects their lives and their decisions, how it redirects their path, how it creates a revolution inside them.”
In that inner revolution lies Salmawy’s quiet faith in literature. Novels may not stop wars, but they can still create a space where individuals confront who they are and who they might yet become. The Eighth Heaven suggests that even late in life, one can choose differently. Love, when joined to responsibility, becomes not an escape from the world, but a way back into it—carrying both the weight of loss and the fragile possibility of dignity.
*This article is published in collaboration with Harf newspaper, the weekly cultural publication published by Al-Dostor Institution.
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