In which a scholar’s daughter learns much about the power of knowledge.
The telling of this story is interestingly done: it starts out like a fairy tale, but gradually shifts until the final scene is pretty much in the series’ usual mode. And there’s a related shift in the narrative voice’s selection of details: the story is set in a modern world, with computers and a thriving spaceport, but those details don’t really start getting mentioned until the latter part of the story, when the fairy tale gloss has already begun to slip away.
Much as I like this story, I’m uncomfortable about the way the authors have given Skardu’s fictional oppressive religion recognisable elements of the real religion of Islam. I suspect it’s at least partly done as part of the fairy-tale atmosphere, to add a bit of Arabian Nights flavour, but that doesn’t actually help; it makes it seem like the authors are saying that, because these cultural details have appeared in fairy stories, they’ve become a kind of exotic story spice that can be mixed into a new story without thinking about the real cultures and real people they came from. (This is not, regrettably, the only story in the Liaden series with this problem.)
On this re-read, I find myself comparing this story to Tamora Pierce’s story “Elder Brother”, which I read last year. It’s also set in an imagined culture with a religion that oppresses women (with, again, elements resembling elements of Islam), and the main female character’s arc is in many ways like Inas Bhar’s. One thing I get out of the comparison is that it highlights how much this is an outsider’s viewpoint of Skardu; the fairy-tale overlay makes it a story about somewhere far, far away, where people are strange and different, and although our protagonist was born there, she never really belongs. Skardu exists mainly as a place for the protagonist to leave. Pierce’s protagonist is also an outsider in her own culture (like Inas, she had one parent from somewhere with less restrictive ideas) who ends up leaving, but the depiction of her homeland is less distanced — and what really helps is that Pierce didn’t leave it at that; she returned to the setting later to explore the stories of the women inside the culture, who never had the chance to leave or who saw something in it worth staying for. Seeing Skardu fleshed out like that would make me feel better about this story; there’s a glimpse of what it might be like in Inas’s conversations with her sisters on the night of Humaria’s betrothal, but it’s not much set against the rest of the story, and more wouldn’t hurt.
Tomorrow: “Heirloom”
I was not uncomfortable at all. I have lived for years in Chad, Nigeria, Côte D’Ivoire, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Cambodia ( and within shouting distance of a mosque in all six countries). My knowledge and experience is that the oppressive characteristics associated with Islam are a result of caricatures in the West, the intersection of the religion with an already conservative culture, a very much minority sect of the religion, or some combination thereof. In Chad, for example, when I lived there, there was an entertaining debate in the newspapers about a proliferation of stabbings going on in the elementary schools and whether the youths should be allowed to carry knives with them. The public view, by about 10-1, was that of course they should.
All the perpetrators and the majority of the victims were girls.
Nateesa would have felt right at home there.
I believe it was very much the Arabian Nights concept you also alluded to.
For the most part, I get caught up in the story part of a story, and never think about the possible stereotypes or relagating something real to mere “story spice.” Sometimes, when issues are pointed out to me later, I can see them, but sometimes, I’m still completely oblivious.
I enjoyed this story for the background it gives us about a character we will see a lot more of down the line. I had not read this story first, which left my understanding of the character lacking when I first read—is it Dragon in Exile?
Reading this again, I am more conscious of the “story spice” aspect, and yet, why not? Certainly there are indeed smaller sects of Islam that embrace the fundamentalist extremes of that religion, just as there are certain “sects” of Christianity that do the same . . . only we in the US usually call them “cults.” Our authors seem to have postulated a planet that was settled by such a group that chose to isolate itself from the more liberal society of the rest of the galaxy.
I think it should be noted, before we wander too far down a false trail, that the religion of Iravati is clearly not literally any form of Islam; while it has aspects that resemble Muslim practice and culture, it also has beliefs that go against basic tenets of Islam, most obviously in being polytheistic.
If it actually were directly modelled on Islam, I might actually be less bothered by it, because that would mean the authors had thought about the culture they were borrowing from and paid attention to the context it exists in, and not just made off with such isolated bits of it as suited their purpose.
I do see your point. Thanks.