Ali is the son of an Iranian banker, who travelled extensively around the nation he prefers to call Persia in his youth in the 1970s as his father administered financial affairs. He has been a longtime resident of the United States and was one of my sources for Persian proverbs and Arab-Islamic dietary strictures while I was writing Fruit of The Deceiver and Forty Hands of Night.

A writer can search such things online. But anytime you come across a word that does not have a single English equivalent [like Arabic halal and Hellenic arête] it is best to speak to an articulate member of that culture.

The other morning he sat next to me on a park bench holding in his hands a promotional excerpt from Chapter 4: A Man Well-Travelled. I could tell by the look in his eyes that Ali was concerned that, by speaking with me, he might have aided and abetted a literary slight of his faith and his culture. He did not seem to want to believe this and was looking for me to articulate the historical and fictional parameters of the story:

“You researched this, and it is true that Egypt was like one of these zombie movies on American TV?”

“The zombies are entirely fictional, a device necessary to sell this historical tale, as readers of horror do not have patience for history and readers of history do not generally care to read horror. The bulk of the narrative consists of human crimes against fellow humans and is taken strictly from the account of Abd al-Latif.”

“My, this is so terrible!”

“I did not want readers to get the impression that this was an Arabic or Islamic thing, but that it was frighteningly common down through the ages. At the head of most chapters and sections I placed quotes about cannibalism that occurred in other cultures. Actually the Chinese seem to have been the worst; the only society [other than the Aztecs] where they had legal statutes that codified who might be eaten, and even set up government sanctioned eateries for consuming people!”

“I come from an educated family; have read my entire life. How is it that I have never read about this?”

“I believe the absence of these accounts in the general historic record, and the fact that details are scattered in the dusty corners of libraries are two:

“First there is a general aversion to speaking ill of the dead. Except where a political will exists to keep a social sense of injustice or fractional hatred alive concerning past crimes, these things become buried in the collective psyche, and I believe emerge in folktales about werewolves and vampires and zombies, and ultimately in today’s movies and TV shows.”

“Yes, to not speak ill of the dead is a common value. All cultures practice reverence of the dead in some way. But to eat them, how can that be common too?”

“I found no evidence that cannibalism is common in day-to-day terms, but rather that it—when it occurs—is commonly a thing that survivors, and particularly the guilty, do not want to be remembered, especially in light of the possibility that one’s ancestors might have done these things.”

“So what is the second reason for us not getting the historical news of such terrible things? Surely this is your big reason.”

“Most historical accounts in most cultures, up until the last two hundred years, were recorded and preserved by religious men, who have a vested interest—indeed a duty—to hold up the ancestors as a model of social norms and values. Horrible happenings like this usually find their way into folk tales in places like China, Germany and the Arab world and are there buried as entertainments to scare children in stories of witches and adventurers and jinn. There is also fragmentary evidence from histories of wars that rarely exceed a line. But once looked for these are found to be numerous. The reason why this account is so explicit is it was a rare example of a medical text written by a travelling doctor, who found it necessary to apologize for recording his observations!

“Abd al-Latif knew that those who lived through this and those who did not would agree that it was an episode best left unrecorded. He seemed though, to be writing in the hopes that the multitude of innocents—virtually all the poor children of Cairo he claimed—who were killed and eaten would not be forgotten. If he were alive today he would be an obstetrician.

“I have the Muslim characters largely blaming Christians for this evil plague, as the famine had been brought on by the Fourth Crusade, and later Egypt, under the very same Sultan, would be completely ruined by the Fifth Crusade two decades later. I had to assume that medieval Muslims would be just as horrified by the catholic—codified 14 years after the events described by Abd al-Latif at the Fourth Lateran Council—belief that the wine and wafer of the Eucharist were in actual fact the blood and flesh of their God as we are.”

[Makes disgusted face with bugged out eyes of horror.]

“All Muslim cities had indigenous and visiting Christian populations, and Islamic scholars therefore had access to Christian doctrinal details.”

“Oh I thought we just beheaded people!”

[Sad laughter]

“I also wanted to use this story as an opportunity to note the high academic tenor of Islamic life before the Mongol and Turkish invasions by playing up the Turkish mercenaries in Egypt as the heavies.”

“That is good. You know, in the south of our country near Afghanistan there are still numerous Mongols who we call Moguls. They have the broad-faced Chinese look and are very nasty; violent and brutal. They are the growers of the opium poppy. During my time there with my father, I must say, was the only time in which I ever feared for my life, and I have travelled much. The central government leaves them alone. I could well imagine a world where they ruled, how terrible that must have been. Though, one must admire them like one admires Tamerlane, for doing what they say and following their word, no matter how terrible.

“Still, these things you write about are terrible, and should not be forgotten. Good luck with your book.”

I can well imagine the concern of a peaceful Muslim like Ali over the thought of a horror novel set in Arab Egypt written, promoted and read by secularized Westerners. For that very reason I wrote Fruit of The Deceiver and Forty Hands of Night as tales of primal terror viewed through a medieval Muslim perspective. What I wished to craft was an Islamic view of terrible things that would be intelligible to the modern secularized or nominally Christian reader of horror and speculative-fiction.

Both of Ali’s quotes appear near the end of Forty Hands of Night.

Thank you Ali.