Presentation Date:
This session, focusing on Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, was hosted on October 15, 2012 by the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program. It featured both author Camilla Gibb and Professor William Granara of Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures.
View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p7o6afb749v/
When Lilly is eight years old, her hippie British parents leave her at a Sufi shrine in Morocco and inform her they will be back to collect her in three days. Three weeks later, she learns they've been murdered. Lilly fills that haunted hollow in her life with intense study and memorization of the Qur'an under the patient care of the Sufi saint's disciple she was entrusted to. Years later, her journey from Morocco to Harar, Ethiopia, is half pilgrimage, half flight. In Harar, even her very traditional Muslim head scarves cannot hide her white skin in her new and strange surroundings; the word "farenji"--foreigner--is hissed at her everywhere she turns. She eventually builds a life for herself teaching children the Qur'an, and she finds herself falling in love with an idealistic young doctor. But the two are wrenched apart when Lilly is again forced to flee, for her safety and his, this time to London. Despite her British roots, Lilly discovers she is as much an outsider in London as a Muslim as she was in Harar as a white foreigner.
Gibb's haunting narrative takes us seamlessly on a journey between these two distinct worlds: the ancient walled city of Harar and the racially charged atmosphere of 1980s London. Gibb richly evokes the stinging disconnect between Lilly's past life and her present life, between her attempts to start anew and her inability to let go of the past. The book offers insight into Sufism in Morocco, Islam in Ethiopia, peace and conflict in Ethiopia, Islam and Muslim immigrants’ life in Europe, and experiences of Otherness; Anthropology & Sociology, Islamic Studies, African Studies, Religious Studies.