Novelist Mohamed Ould Mohamed Salem’s novel “Fitna Al-Rabad” was published in Beirut by the Arab Foundation for Studies and Publications, and it came in 222 medium-sized pages.
The story of the novel begins when the writer suddenly finds the text of an unknown writer who took part in the events of the clashes of the inhabitants of the districts of Cordoba against the Prince Al-Hakam bin Hisham bin Abdul Rahman Al-Dakhil. , the third prince of the Umayyads of Andalusia, AH 202. It is an unknown text Its author is completely unknown, and there is no mention in the ancient sources, without finding any information about that text, its style is refined and brought closer to today’s reader, and the facts based on contemporary narrative techniques to reorganize and coordinate, and to produce in the manner of a Modern.
The novel narrates the events of that conflict, and the conflict that arose between the government and its agents, on the one hand, and on the other, some statesmen, jurists and ordinary people, as a result of the government’s tyranny and injustice. and the arbitrariness of local agents, and the story of the strange friendship between the jurist Talut bin Abdul-Jabbar Al-Maafiri, one of the leaders of the rebels, and the young Jewish carpenter Haim Al-Ishbili, who hid the jurist in his house. after a year of strife, and also the story of the narrator with Abu Ayyub, a Christian blacksmith. The narrator was working as a strike boy (blacksmith) in Abu Ayyub’s shop when the fight broke out. active in it, and a steadfast love arose between them, as well as the stories of the people who participated in it, burned its fires, and brought painful consequences to their lives.
The events of the novel follow each other in a confusing combination, taking the reader to the heart of the conflict scenes, its twists and turns and the positions of multiple characters, through a continuous narrative.
The novel uses all modern narrative techniques, and mixes historical fact with imagination, to create a picture of Cordoba society at that time, in which ethnic and multi-religious human elements were mixed, focusing on the human being.
Mohamed Ould Mohamed Salem is a Mauritanian novelist and journalist, director of Al-Sharqiya and Al-Wusta magazines of the Department of Culture in Sharjah (UAE). He has published five novels: Things from an Ancient World, Memory of Sand, Paths of Abdel Baraka, Dahhan and Khaled’s Games with Corona.
From the passages of the novel, we read on the last cover: (Cordoba was filled with commotion on account of their murder, and people gathered from all the districts and neighborhoods, their eyes fixed on that terrible scene… Those honorable men, nobles. From the heart of Cordoba, whose lives they once lost… Eighty men or more, all of them had many houses, followers or students attached to the city, the masters and sheikhs left, and the life after them was not pleasant … The soldiers multiplied on the pavement, at the door of the arch and to the end of the wall on the west side, corpses Forming the lines guarded by those nobles… Moaning was heard everywhere until the earth seemed to tremble above us… The tears overwhelmed me… The arrogance of the soldiers and the arrogance with which they pushed us away and beat us burned my liver, my breasts. swelling, until the terror and fear vanished from the souls, and that was the first day we dared to face the soldiers and judge plainly, and our speech was made public, plainly, during the day.
