SHAHIDA is set in the near-future Gaza Strip. It combines the brisk pace of Middle Eastern mysteries such as Zoe Ferraris’s City of Veils and Matt Rees’s A Grave in Gaza with the intense, interior narration style of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Shunned by her family, Rabia, a disgraced young mother, starts class in Gaza City’s “women’s education program”—a school that trains women as wives, and marries them to graduating men. She needs the marriage to regain custody of her infant daughter, but faces the danger of jail or stoning if she violates the land’s strict, unfamiliar laws.
Yet the school has a covert agenda. Because Rabia already has a child, making her an unlikely candidate for marriage, the dean compels her to join a political club for women. In the club, she embarks on a secret double life that puts her in more danger, but offers hope of eventual escape. She discovers that the women in the club are being trained as shahidat, suicide bombers; but once in, Rabia cannot leave lest she be stoned as a collaborator, and leave her daughter motherless.
Her only escape is a fellow student who offers to help her in exchange for favors to an underground organization. The favors become more dangerous—but also lead to Sami, a resister whom she must learn to trust if she is to survive. As the price of her escape, they make a daring effort to expose the school’s covert agenda, and start a chain reaction that could forever change the land where veils hide all, and where every personal act is also political.
I write about the Middle East because of man's inhumanity to man. This border crossing exists, and it's hardly the worst.
