Jamal Mahjoub. In the Hour of Signs. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann , Reviewed by Jay L. This novel of ideas probes "that mystery of mysteries, religion" p. The protagonist is Hawi "Lover," in the spiritual sense , a late nineteenth-century Seeker who fled his home in the Sudan as a young man after narrowly escaping hanging for apostasy; his error was the conviction that he could discern "a second, hidden meaning concealed within holy scripture" p.
While similar perceptions are by no means uncommon, historically, within the mystical tradition of Islam, in the contemporary Sudanese context this reference cannot fail to evoke resonances to Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, author of a controversial work entitled The Second Message of Islam who was hanged for apostasy in Khartoum on 18 January Hawi has spent his years of exile wallowing in morally dubious European venues such as Venice; happily, we are assured, he has not been seduced, and returns to his homeland a virgin just in time to join the Sudanese Mahdia.
Hawi deplores the violence and human cost of the great revolt, but becomes an intimate advisor to the Khalifa 'Abdullahi. He survives the battle before Omdurman that brings down the Mahdist state, only to be lynched by a mob when he begins again, after so many years, to preach his unconventional message--the content of which however is not mentioned.
What the author actually may have to say about religion, if anything, thus remains unknown, beyond the modestly startling theological claim that dead Muslims go to that painfully Christian province of the Hereafter, Purgatory p.
Whether coyness will preserve the author from the fate of Salman Rushdie, should some True Believer take a serious dislike to anything he says, remains to be seen. All the ills of the northern Sudan are imported alien faults inflicted by vicious outsiders upon the pious, sanctimonious native virgins personified by Hawi. Drunkenness, filth and betrayal are European eg pp. The typical slut p. A more typical South Sudanese vice is criminality p.
