In the Name of Identity is as close to summer reading as philosophy gets. In this novel, the first by Amin Maalouf to be set in the modern Middle East, the author’s exceptional gift of narrative lends itself to a story that becomes a powerful allegory for the struggles and anarchy that have beset his native land for the last half century. The Jewish Muslim couple move to Haifa, but if one war has made a hero out of Ossyane, another, much closer to home, is destined to separate him from the people and the world that he loves. He returns to Beirut, to a rebel hero’s welcome after all, and to joyful marriage with Clara.
War breaks out in Europe, and Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance, where he meets Clara. But his brilliant, dutiful son develops into a peaceable young man, and travels to France to study, away from the burden of his father’s revolutionary ambitions. When Ossyane’s father gives him that name, it represents the protest of an aristocratic but liberal man against a history of sectarianism and violence that has characterized the world he inherited from his Ottoman ancestors.
Translated from the French by Alberto Manguel To call your son Ossyane is like calling him Rebellion or Disobedience. He is the author of five highly acclaimed novels including Samarkand which was also published by Interlink. Amin Maalouf won the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios. In the pages of The Gardens of Light, Mani’s cry for tolerance can be heard echoing across the centuries of our times.
Amin Maalouf brings life and color to the character and times of Mani. The mystic exercised a powerful attraction over his disciples rulers and scholars, itinerant merchants, shippers, baptists and sages who inhabited the shores of the Tigris and was hated by the Magi, the high priests of Zoroastrianism who felt threatened and eventually had him imprisoned, tortured and killed in 276 AD.
This came to be known as Manichaeism and attracted vast numbers of disciples. He advocated ‘The Gospel of Light’ a religious system which was a mixture of Gnostic Christian beliefs, ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and some pagan elements. The Gardens of Light tells the life story of Mani, painter, doctor, and prophet born in Mesopotamia modern day Iraq in the early third century of the Christian era.
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