Publisher's Synopsis
The West media created a false image of the Muslim world and the historical role of women in past times. There are very important women in the past of Islamic countries forgotten today: philosophers, saints, queens, doctors, writers and wisdom´s teachers women. In this novel it is possible appreciate echoes and readings from Fátima Mernissi (Islam and Democracy); Annemarie Schimmel (My Soul is a woman. The Femenine in Islam); Margaret Smith (Rabia the Mystic and her Fellow Saints in Islam) and others female writers who made in her books a contextualized interpretation of Islam.The main character in this novel is a sufi woman who uses her particular interpretation of Kuran in order to get more freedom for women under Taliban regime. Also appears a magician woman, a female version of the popular Nasrudin, who teaches Feminism through storytelling.Surely, the vision we have of Sufism in the West is Rumi poems and Dervisch dances. In this novel the Dervisch is a contemporary Afghan feminist woman. Other women shout their despair to the sky. You hear kind voices that try to calm them, attempting to silence them in order to avoid their being killed if their blasphemies are heard. But it is death they are calling. Let them die. Let them shout so that the guardians for prevention of vice will hear them. Let them be carried off and killed, thus saving them the torture of dying enchained. You are lucky to have learned how to break the chains every night. No one knows that each evening at sunset you sail off like the butterflies and escape the prison. You hear the women and you are one with them but you do not suffer. That is the mystery; you don't suffer. You use the techniques that the Master taught you to free yourself from the odious chains. Suffering is not real. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, both illusion, neither is real. Reality is that unnamed essence inside, the love that bursts forth from your heart and expands beyond your body.
