In Praise of Hatred

Khaled Khalifa's Aleppo is the walled old city of the late 1970s and 1980s: a grand family house behind heavy doors, the covered stone souqs, the Citadel above them, a girls' school and the university on the edge of town. A young woman's family is pulled apart as the Ba'athist state and the Muslim Brotherhood turn on each other, a conflict that ends in the 1982 destruction of Hama to the south. The map holds to the Old City and reaches out once, to Hama.

The narrator

The family house, Old City

Part One

The story is narrated by a young woman growing up in her family's large, shuttered house in the old quarter of Aleppo, a world of courtyards, aunts and religious observance. As the country's crisis deepens, that enclosed household becomes the ground on which her turn toward radical certainty begins.

Part One

inferred The novel does not give the house a street address; it sets it among the grand old courtyard houses of Aleppo's walled Old City, so this marks the historic core of that quarter, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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The narrator

The covered souqs (al-Madina)

Part One

The family's standing rests partly on trade, and the covered stone souqs of the Old City recur as the everyday economy around the household. Al-Madina Souq is the largest covered historic market in the world, its narrow vaulted lanes threading between the Great Mosque and the Citadel.

Part One

explicit The covered market of the Old City is al-Madina Souq, the vaulted stone bazaar that runs west from the Citadel; this marks a representative point along it.

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The narrator

The Citadel of Aleppo

Part One

The great medieval Citadel rises over the Old City, the fixed landmark against which the household's daily life plays out. Its mass on the skyline is a constant in a book whose ground keeps shifting under sectarian fear and state suspicion.

Part One

explicit The Citadel is a named, fixed landmark: the medieval fortified hill at the centre of the Old City.

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