TMR Bookgroup Discusses Mai Al-Nakib’s “An Unlasting Home” with the author

When you live in a conservative society, you run the risk of censure. How far should a philosophy professor stick her neck out to make a point? Would you put it all on the line in the pursuit of truth or justice, or whatever informs your intent?

An Unlasting Home, by award-winning short story writer Mai Al-Nakib, opens in the summer of 2013. Sara Tarek Al-Ameed, a professor of philosophy at the Kuwait University for eleven years, is in the midst of preparing a paper arguing the importance of supplementing the religious curriculum with an early introduction to philosophy at the level of primary public school education in Kuwait. However, a phone recording by one of the munaqaba girls in her intro to philosophy class (in which she is heard arguing that “God is dead”) has been passed on to the most conservative member of the Kuwaiti Parliament — a Salafi, who has filed a complaint. Sara is arrested at her home and charged with blasphemy, a capital crime that comes with the threat of execution, under the newly amended Kuwaiti penal code. In the author’s note, Al-Nakib explains that although such an amendment did in fact come to pass by a wide majority of the elected parliament in 2013, the Emir of Kuwait, who holds authority over all amendments of laws, rejected it. This work of fiction, explains the author, imagines otherwise. (From the review by Rana Asfour.)

Sunday, Sept. 25, with novelist Mai Al-Nakib. To join discussion, email books@themarkaz.org.