Overview

Book One in The Sufi Mysteries Quartet It's easier to solve a crime than solve yourself Baghdad, 295 Hijri (907 CE) Zaytuna just wants to be left alone to her ascetic practices and nurse her dark view of the world. But when an impoverished servant girl she barely knows comes and begs her to bring some justice to the death of a local boy, she is forced to face the suffering of the most vulnerable in Baghdad and the emotional and mystical legacy of her mother, a famed ecstatic whose love for God eclipsed everything. The Lover introduces us to the emotional, spiritual, and social world of medieval Baghdad through the lives of the great Sufi mystics, washerwomen, Hadith scholars, tavern owners, slaves, corpsewashers, police, and children indentured to serve in the homes of the wealthy.

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9781777531317

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Completely engrossing and richly atmospheric. Tenth century Baghdad comes alive through the eyes of a dazzling cast of characters. -Ausma Zehanat Khan, critically acclaimed author of A Deadly Divide from The Getty-Khattak Mysteries, and The Khorasan Archives And yet it is The Lover's first-rate storytelling and characters that propel it to enormity. At heart, the novel is a murder mystery involving the death of a young, male servant, where a police investigator and the local daughter and son of a famed female ecstatic converge and unwind the sordid circumstances surrounding the boy's death. Upon the seeming simplicity of this narrative arc Silvers builds the rich inner world of her principle personas. They drive the story with their respective refusals to accept injustice, and with their struggles to find a piety that makes sense to them. -Adam Gaiser, Muslim World Too often, narratives of women in Islam are told from the vantage point of the privileged, the women of the wealthy classes. This novel turns that narrative on its head. -Safiyyah Surtee, Four Muslim Women on Laury Silvers' The Lover: A Sufi Mystery, in AltMuslimah Silvers debut novel transports the reader to 10th century Baghdad, during the city's golden age when it was one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world. Her exquisite descriptions of the city and erudite knowledge of its historical denizens render real the people of Baghdad to the reader, whether pious mystics, cynical wine merchants, or frontier soldiers turned detectives. It's a great mystery and its faithful portrayal of Baghdad makes it a compelling read for anyone interested in the history of Islam and the Medieval Middle East. -Sherwan Hindreen Ali, a Baghdadi native and graduate student in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University The Lover successfully weaves together fiction with meticulous historical research. -Michael Mumisa, Cambridge Special Livingstone Scholar With an informed, historical view of the spiritual atmosphere in medieval Baghdad, Laury Silvers has written an exciting mystery in lucid, gripping prose, bringing to life complex individuals of the past, moral agents both layered and conflicted. -Cyrus Ali Zargar, Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor, UCF and Author of The Polished Mirror

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