The Jealous
A Sufi Mystery
Laury Silvers
Published by Laury Silvers
Copyright © Laury Silvers, 2020 All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Ali Jafri
Copyright © Laury Silvers, 2020 All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction based on historical places, circumstances, and, in some cases, historical persons as read through the primary sources of the period and the secondary scholarship concerning it. All historical places, persons, and interpretations are ultimately the product of the author’s imagination.
Limited selected quotes adapted from secondary and primary sources fall under “Fair Use.” Alexander Knysh kindly gave his permission for the use of quotations adapted from his translation of al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism. Emil Homerin kindly gave his permission for the use of his translation of a selection from Aishah Ba`uniyya’s poems in The Principles of Sufism.
ISBN 978-1-9991228-5-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-9991228-6-7 (electronic book)
For my mother.
(1933-2020)
She taught me that love is my religion.
Acknowledgements
My mother, Evelyn Silvers, was here for every moment of writing both books. She was the cheerleader every child wishes for herself. I am blessed beyond words. What thanks could I possibly offer to meet the freedom she gave me as a child to become my own person and her pride in me, no matter what I did? I am only sorry that she did not live to know that I had dedicated the book to her. I wanted her to hold the book in her hands and see it in print.
My partner, Michael, did hours and hours of careful editing, debating story points, reminding me of my characters’ motivations, and pointing out gaps. He also wrote all the fight scenes. I relied on him every step of the way. There would be no book without him.
Layla Abdullah-Poulos gave me her time and expertise as she does to so many writers who are just starting out. She is an unsung hero, so let me sing her praises. More than showing me where my writing could improve, she walked me through the characterization of Mu’mina and other characters who are either affected by racial prejudices or who are the instigators of it. She made sure that I did not give in to stereotypes or tropes, and most importantly, that I pulled no punches. If I’ve erred, it is on me.
The academic and primary sources I relied on for the writing of this book are detailed on my website. Here, I would like to thank those who were generous in sending me published and unpublished works that helped me build this world as richly as possible and also answered my questions when I got stuck or confused.
Mathieu Tillier’s work was essential to my account of the distinct justice systems. But he also gave me his valuable time over many emails, suggesting how Mu’mina’s case might work through the secular and religious legal system and saving me from several fatal errors in my fictional account of the religious court system. Where I break with the historical evidence for the sake of drama, and I do that in a number of ways, I break with his scholarship and guidance.
On slavery, race, and consent, Peter Gray, Rachel Schine, Saadia Yacoob, and Yasmin Amin helped me navigate the primary and secondary sources, and shared their own works. Peter Gray helped me address the ethical questions in the book without risking anachronism. Much of the dialogue that touches on attitudes towards race in the book come from Rachel Schine’s hard-hitting scholarship on depictions of black people in classical Arab literature. Saadia Yacoob’s work on al-Sarakhsi demonstrates that some legal scholars did have a concern for female consent and experience during this period. Yasmin Amin gave me sources and confirmed for me the strong record that Muhammad sought sexual consent from all his wives and slaves. Ash Geissinger pointed out some crucial insights in this vein that find their way into the narrative. Although it does not make an appearance in the book, Maryam Alkandari shared with me her helpful work on elite slaves in the Abbasid period.
Wes Snyder guided me in my characterization of Tansholpan by answering questions and sharing primary source materials that helped me understand how she would experience her abilities and her place in society. She is a complex character and I have Wes to thank for it.
Sarah Munawar and Michael Arnowit guided me in my characterization of the blind seer. They made sure she was not a stereotype and suggested where I could offer better depictions of diverse attitudes towards the blind elsewhere in the book.
Aun Hasan Ali educated me on all the details on the Shia of Baghdad. Sara Shah directed me to the story of Hurr upon which I built a major character arc. She and Zishan Syed also advised me on all the passages in which Shia characters express their experiences. Raha Rafii gave me insight into Shia law in the period.
Sara Abdel-Latif and Zahra Ayubi helped me think through historical articulations of ideal masculinity in early Sufism. Saliha DeVoe, Michael Quinsey, and Dubois Jennings talked to me about how Tein and Ammar would work through the challenges that face them as men. In particular, Dubois discussed with me how black men navigate the racism they encounter from their non-black male friends. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Pernilla Myrne and Marion Katz on masculinity and jealousy, and the sayings of Abu al-Husayn al-Nuri on self-sacrifice, which became the heart of this discussion in the book.
Nahyan Fancy checked Doctor Judah’s medical opinions for me. Jennifer Bryson advised me at the outset on what medical conditions might fit the plot best. reneé mercuri provided me with crucial details on women’s medical concerns. Shamseldin Rogers, Marion Katz, Nakia Jackson, Shabana Mir, and a number of women on Facebook gave me great insight into women’s sexual health.
Ali A. Olami shared his detailed knowledge of the world of jinn and answered questions whenever I asked. Imran Khan, the journalist, inspired one of the jinn scenes based on something I read in his book, In Truth, Madness.
Rana Mikati shared her work on swearing and oaths. Rachel Schine advised me on period-specific racial insults. I have lost another citation for insults, whoever you are, forgive me. Others are taken from al-Jahiz’s Book of Misers.
Talha Ahsan generously answered questions, offered sources, and suggested a scene in the book for Mustafa. Noor Naga gave me early and essential encouragement. Kristian Petersen helped me build YingYue’s character. Katrina Daly Thompson found Mu’mina’s birth name, Mwana. Joumana Medlej answered questions on inks and pens. Nadeem Ahmed of Eran and Turan, a Central Asian living history group, helped me dress Yulduz and Tansholpan. Jonathan Parkes Allen advised me on waterclocks. Nasrin Mahdavieh provided me with Yulduz’s song. Rich Heffron gave me a source for Abbasid era sermons and Soad Mansory helped me find just the right line. Ash Geissinger answered many questions about hadith, Qur’an, and legal matters whenever I asked.
I also want to thank the many people on Twitter who piped up when I had a quick question, helping round out small matters in the book such as Syed Ziryab, @Basicbebe1, and Zainub of @chitty0chitty, and Zainab Halipoto. There were many more, forgive me for leaving you out!
Rosemary Quinsey was more than a proofreader, she was also a writing coach. I am grateful for her contribution to my growth as a writer. Kathleen Self read a final draft of the book and pointed out where a little more explaining would do at crucial junctures. Sara Abdel-Latif gave me some proofreading help, as well. But I especially want to thank Shaheen Ali who, after my mother died in the weeks before the release of the book, graciously gave the draft an extra careful last read because I was not in any shape to do so.
I want to thank again Michael Mumisa and Alan Godlas whose mentorship in the writing of The Lover continued to feed my growth as an author in The Jealous. Also, I want to thank all my friends who supported me when The Lover was released. They shared the book, they talked it up, and they g
uided me in reaching out to people in real life and online. In this regard, I want to particularly thank Mo Zabian and Kristian Petersen. Likewise, Adam Gaiser stuck his neck out for me in getting The Lover in the hands of professors who have been, because of him, using it successfully in classrooms since.
My love to my family, Michael, Kaya and Ryan, Mishi and Ben, Eleonore, Tracey, Nancey, Catherine, and Candace and all the Quinseys for their support in the writing of this book. My thanks to my neighbours Bev, JoAnn, Claire, Cathal and the kids for cheering me on, and Billie Girl, as always, for being the very best dog. My sincerest gratitude goes to my teacher, Murat Coskun, for his guidance, and our community for their constant support and companionship.
Finally, thank you to the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto for providing me with a research fellowship allowing me to do the research that brought this story to life.
On History and Fiction
While the background, some storylines, and even some of the dialogue are adapted from historical and literary accounts of Abbasid Baghdad and its inhabitants, this is a work of fiction. I have taken liberties, most especially in how an Iraqi religious court in the ninth and tenth centuries might have adjudicated a murder case. The book takes up some of the uncomfortable realities of life at that time. Social norms such as slavery, racism, shadism, gender divisions, marriage, drinking habits, mosque attendance, and class divisions are all grounded in historical sources. Interested readers may want to read al-Jahiz’s delightful satire The Book of Misers, which accurately depicts the social life and material details of the Abbasid period. Both The Lover (al-Muhibb) and The Jealous (al-Ghuyur) are not among the traditional ninety-nine names but were commonly used during this period.
The prologue contains a reference to a pomegranate tree. It is a reference to Sinan Antoon’s exquisite The Corpse Washer. If your interest in reading my novels is to understand Iraq and the experience of the Iraqi people, please close this book and turn to the work of Iraqi writers such as those found in Hassan Blasim’s Iraq + 100 collections, Shakir Mustafa’s anthology, or Baghdad Noir collections of short stories, and the works of Shahad Al Rawi, Sinan Antoon, Dunya Mikhail, Leilah Nadir, and Ahmed Saadawi. Also see the online journal, “Arab Lit Quarterly.” My novels do not assume to speak for or about the Iraqi people nor the nation of Iraq. They are an exploration of an Abbasid past and, ultimately, the way that past is remembered in the Muslim present.
If you want to know more, there is a glossary and character catalogue at the end of the book. I have also posted historical resources, a teaching guide, and book club questions on my website www.llsilvers.com. Follow me on twitter @waraqamusa and @laurylsilvers on Instagram.

Baghdad, 295 Hijri (907 CE)
The First Day
Prologue
“Saliha, raise her back.” The woman’s head was still safely cradled against her chest. Saliha made sure her grip under her arms was steady, bent her knees just a bit more, and lifted with her legs. As strong as she had become from washing people’s clothes and hauling baskets of laundry to dry on roof terraces, she felt weak now turning the bodies of the dead for ritual washing and wrapping to ready them for the grave.
Usually they washed the bodies in their care while they were lying on their sides. The right side first, head to toe, then the left side, head to toe, three times. This woman was different. Saliha was careful not to lift her so high that the cloth covering her would slip down and expose her naked body, swollen with a tumour as big as a baby and trapped in her womb. Saliha’s legs were screaming from holding still in that position, but she did not make a sound, not even a sharp exhale from the strain escaped her. The dead woman could still hear them. Her soul would remain within her body until the dirt covered her grave and until then, she shouldn’t think she was causing anyone any trouble.
Once Saliha had got the woman’s back high enough, Shatha pressed gently on her stomach. Her hand swept down and away, tracing a path around the tumour that had had taken the woman’s life. Finally, the excrement and urine left in her came out between her legs onto the table. Saliha was careful not to make a face, nor alter her breathing, despite the smell.
Shatha held one of the copper basins filled with water and powdered lotus leaves and poured it over the woman. She lifted the cloth covering her just enough to make sure the water reached between her legs, but not enough to expose her, even to their eyes, expertly rinsing the waste from the body without touching her. The water and waste flowed through the grooves carved into the bench-table and down to a lime-plastered gutter cut into the floor, and from there out under the wall toward a small garden where a pomegranate tree flourished, watered from the washing of the dead.
Following a glance from Shatha, Saliha slowly laid the young woman down onto the table. Together, they turned her on her left to wash her right side. Using another pan of water with ground lotus leaves, Shatha washed her right leg down to her toes.
Saliha tried to concentrate as she filled more water into jugs from the tap to be ready to fill the basins. Each time she had to use it, the tap from the cistern did nothing but distract her. Instead of keeping her mind on caring for their bodies, she took conscious pleasure in the luxury of not having to walk a bucket back and forth, over and over, to the closest public fountain. As her thoughts drifted, she nearly lost her hold on the copper jug as it became heavy with water, catching it just before it clanged against the sink basin. Keep your mind on your work, woman!
Saliha was careful to make as little noise as possible as she emptied the water from the jug into a copper basin, adding nothing this time. They washed the woman again on each side with fresh water until all the pans were empty and nothing but fresh water had flowed out to the foot of the pomegranate tree, soaking the waste into the soil to feed its roots. One last time, she filled the basins. This time she dissolved a small amount of camphor into each, giving the water a clean, even sweet scent, and set them out. Saliha moved back to stand at the head of the woman as Shatha poured the scented water over every inch of her body through the cloth that covered her.
The undissolved camphor no longer stung Saliha’s nose, but its scent lingered on her after work. Zaytuna complained of it to her regularly. At the lightest whiff, she would remind Saliha that her hands never carried the scent of death when they washed clothes together. Uff! Saliha thought, Her complaints aren’t about camphor anyway, are they? But she would not quit this job for their friendship’s sake. She would not go back to washing clothes. It took so much out of her; even if the body were that of an old woman who’d lived a full life, she felt the weight of the work in her bones. It was work most would say was unlike her. Serious. Gentle. Quiet. Respectful. Definitely not good for a laugh. But it suited her sense of life and death. You live. You find some joy. You die. You don’t make a fuss.
Under no circumstances would she tell Zaytuna that the work made her think about what it would be like for her once she was in the hands of the corpse washer herself. Not even if it made Zaytuna accept that the job was good for her. She had never cared a whit what the preachers yelled in the streets, or the imams from the minbars, threatening a tight grave for free souls like her, the filthy rags of her missed prayers thrown in her face, and the bit of love she’d sought with men choking her throat. Yell all you like, preacher, she thought. I am not yours to have a say. I belong to myself and God alone. And what God will do with me, God will do with me. What Saliha could see, what she learned from washing these bodies, was that God took His creatures with care and sorrow for what must be endured in this world. That realization alone had returned her to prayer and her hand held out to God to grasp and pull her to Him.
She looked down at the woman’s eyes, sunken deep in their sockets. Her skin was ashen and slack, tugging on the delicate bones of her face. Alhamdulillah, at least, this one was whole. The beaten bodies of women and children made her flinch as if her dead husband Ayyub were behind her again, ready to
strike. She owed them kindness in death that they had never got in life. She washed their brutalized bodies as if she were touching her own, by the grace of God alone, not here on the washing bench being turned by others’ hands.
Saliha had been here long enough to see every sort of death. Here, the hospital’s corpse washers accepted the bodies of the indigent and the unclaimed, whether they died alone in the streets or after the doctors had done all they could. They washed those whose families could not afford to pay a corpse washer to prepare their loved ones in keeping with the rulings of their own school of law, or those who died in the hospital but had no family to care about the legal particulars of how they found their way to the grave. Since she began this work, Saliha had washed and wrapped the bodies of unclaimed, unknown women or children who had washed up on the shores of the Tigris but whose bodies bore the indelible mark of long neglect.
Her thoughts strayed. Poor Tein, carrying the memory of bleeding and broken bodies from his days as a ghazi, fighting on the frontier. He faced similar tragedies every day now, solving grave crimes for the police. Saliha imagined him near her. His tall, muscular body wanting to touch her, his beautiful deep red-brown skin, the battle scar that snaked along the curve of his bicep and over his shoulder nearly reaching his throat, his high cheekbones and full lips, that scruff of beard on his pointed chin, and his eyes, his eyes with those long lashes. Subhanallah! In her mind, he was looking over her shoulder, watching her work and admiring her for it. Knowing brutality and death the way the two of them do now, she thought, He should be even more willing to have a little fun with me. Don’t we both deserve some comfort? Some life in so much death?
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