Symposium: Sincere Thieves

Isabella Hammad’s wonderful debut novel, The Parisian, opens in 1914, as World War I begins and the Ottoman Empire ends. Midhat Kamal is the contemplative son of a well-to-do clothier who travels from Nablus, an Ottoman-ruled Arab city in Palestine, to France to study medicine at the University of Montpellier. His hosts are the widowed Dr. Molineu and his daughter Jeannette, a beautiful woman about Midhat’s age whose presence preoccupies him. As Midhat immerses himself in the study of the human body and its ailments, the social life of the Molineus, and his budding relationship with Jeannette, a chance encounter with a notebook reveals that his host is intently studying him: Dr. Molineu has invited Midhat to stay, it seems, so that he might formulate theories on “the effect of new language learned by a primitive brain.” 

Outraged, Midhat abruptly leaves Montpellier, and his study of medicine, for Paris, where he studies history and philosophy while discussing Arab independence with a group of Syrian Arabs. These conversations, and the events that form the backdrop of the novel, concern the uncertain fates of nations struggling to define what they are and, crucially, which people belong to them. 

Eventually Midhat returns to Nablus, which the British have occupied in the wake of World War I. There, a misdirected letter derails his romance with Jeannette. Midhat’s father, a distant, authoritarian man preoccupied with his new family in Cairo, forbids his return to France, and Midhat sets about learning the family textile business. He marries Fatima, the daughter of an aristocratic Nablus family—a marriage that begins with the intercession of Midhat’s beloved and ever-present grandmother Um Taher. Midhat meets Fatima via a glance snatched through a keyhole; their first conversation takes place on their wedding day. Fatima had done her own maneuvering to bring about the engagement with Midhat over some other, theoretical groom selected by her family: “Better to ride an ungrounded conviction and make her own choice, than to find herself being thrust by the neck, flung wide over the precipice, and out into the sea,” she thinks.

The Parisian is in many respects an exploration of individual and collective struggle to shape events within conditions set by other people. While the edicts of his remote father guide the course of Midhat’s economic and private life, the interference of foreign governments—via policies like the Balfour Declaration,...