THE PEN THAT WAS MIGHTIER THAN ISIL’S SWORD
A prisoner in her own home during Mosul’s occupation, Hadeel Ziad put her time to good use – writing her first novel. Florian Neuhof reports
She was busy learning about dental fillings, crowns and bridges when the ISIL fighters swept into Mosul and turned her life upside down. Her daily routine of university study was swapped for life indoors, a self-imposed retreat to shut out the dire reality of the caliphate declared by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in the northern Iraq city’s Al Nouri mosque, not far from her home.
By her reckoning, Hadeel Ziad left the house only 10 times during the next three years, on essential trips such as doctor’s appointments. Covered in a black garment from head to toe, with even her eyes shielded by a niqab and her fingers concealed by gloves, she would venture outside only with a male relative, as mandated by the rules imposed by ISIL.
Ziad was desperate for an escape, and she found it in her passion for writing. A keen reader of Arabic literature and novels, she had dabbled in short stories. As the terrorist group shut down life in Mosul, and air strikes heralded a fierce battle to remove the militants, she began to write a romantic novel.
“I was stuck at home, so I decided to write,” the 22-yearold tells The National. She covers her hair, but wears a tight-fitting jumper and a knee-length denim skirt, just as she did before ISIL took over.
Immersing herself in the writing of romantic fiction was a palliative to the outside world. “There was a lot of war and destruction, and I wanted to write about love rather than dealing with the war,” she says, sitting in the reception room of the family home in Mosul’s Jadida district. With the city liberated, calm has returned to the affluent neighbourhood, and spring has come to the well-kept garden outside.
Mosul still bears the scars of war, with nothing like enough money to rebuild destroyed infrastructure and bombed houses. But the guns have fallen silent and aircraft no longer circle to drop their deadly payloads. The ISIL killing squads that once roamed the streets are gone, and Ziad now travels through the city without fear.
She is back at university, crossing the Tigris on a bridge patched up after being bombed by the US-led coalition, and attends lectures in buildings once boobytrapped and gutted by ISIL.
Things were different when she began writing about Abdulrahim and Rayla, who met in a cafe and started dating. With electricity limited to two hours a day, Ziad would write a first draft on paper during the day, and type it up at night while her laptop was charging, working until the machine ran out of power.
Afraid of air strikes and unannounced visits by ISIL or its sympathisers, she often wrote in the basement.
Set in a fictional world resembling Iraqi society but bearing no reference to time or place, the novel, I Love You
With Every Breath, is rich in emotion and drama. Having fallen in love, Abdulrahim and Rayla plan to marry. This is at first opposed by her family, who have a string of suitors for the young woman. The parents relent at last, only for Abdulrahim to get cold feet. Pretending to have cancer, he breaks off the engagement, and leaves Rayla devastated.
Ziad is convinced that she would have been killed had she been caught by the Hisbah, ISIL’s morality police, or Emni, the group’s secret service. Writing became a form of personal resistance.
“I tried to break the rules in any way I could. After all, a terrorist group had invaded my city,” she says.
She finished her manuscript just as Iraqi forces were gearing up to retake Mosul from ISIL. The battle commenced in October 2016, and lasted for months. During that time, thousands of civilians would die as the insurgents used the population as shields.
“I considered it my legacy in case I didn’t survive the war, I really wanted it to be published,” Ziad says. Her area of the city was liberated in March last year, at great cost to its inhabitants.
The neighbourhood made headlines around the world when a coalition air strike hit a house packed with civilians, killing at least 100 people. Ziad’s family had taken to an underground existence soon after the battle for the city began.
“In the five months before the liberation, we stayed in the basement all the time. We didn’t know if there was night or day outside,” she says.
During those months, she began work on a second, as yet unfinished, book to cope with her fear. A fictionalised account of ISIL’s reign in Mosul, it is a dark contrast to her first novel.
After the liberation of Mosul in July last year, Ziad sent the draft of her romantic novel to her brother Ali, an author of several books, who passed the manuscript to his publishing house in Jordan, which duly released the novel this year. The book is already on the market in Jordan, the UAE and in Qatar, says Ziad, brandishing a crisp new copy.
So far, the novel is not available in Mosul, but that will change. Another brother, Ahmed, is planning to open a book cafe in the city, and the novel will be stocked there.
It may not go down well with everyone. Even with ISIL gone, the family had to endure something of a backlash to the book’s publication, Ahmed says. Mosul is a largely conservative city, and neighbours and relatives grumbled about Ziad’s refusal to comply with what is classed as expected by elders.
“They said things like ‘What she did is shameful, it will bring shame to her and the family. A woman is not supposed to write,’” says Ahmed, who chaperones his sister through the interview.
The criticism leaves Ziad cold. Softly spoken and slight, she regards herself as a feminist and is determined to pursue her writing.
“People who oppose women’s rights are uneducated. There needs to be more education,” she says with a shrug.
And the love story she wrote is not yet over, given it remains unclear why Abdulrahim decided to leave the heartbroken Rayla. The sequel to her debut novel will be her third book.