My turn this week, a number of readers of Inshallah
have commented on the ending of the story, I have always felt that to not
understand the end is to miss the point of the book. It was written while I was
living in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s and early 80s specifically to address
the miss understanding by the expatriate of the local culture at that time in
contrasting the beliefs of the West and Islam. To show through the medium of a
romantic story how the Arab felt about us and how we understood (sometimes
misunderstood) the Arabs and their religion. The story leads at the end to a
situation where to be true to Islam or Christianity has to be decided, but I
was in no way about say which was correct and so left the story in a conclusion
where the reader had to decide the outcome.
King Faisal who was King then had to bring his nation
up to speed in the modern world and judging from the internet his leadership
has been followed. Now the Khamis (the setting for Inshallah) I knew as a
village appears to have become a large modern town. My story was a tale of the
time and I dare say expatriates and Saudis have moved on, in that way it
becomes more of a historical theme but will, hopefully, still be useful to
those travelling to Saudi with a western background.
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