Stranger’s gift: a vision of religious tolerance
Priest translates 1897 novel for today’s readers
The first time Basil Solounias came across a novel by the celebrated 19th-century Arabic author Jurji Zaidan, it was 1971, and Solounias was studying theology at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York.
One day, a Lebanese stranger approached him outside the chapel and asked if he was bored. “Yes and no,” Solounias replied. It was summertime, yes, but his friends were away on vacation, and, being from Lebanon himself, Solounias had no family on this side of the Atlantic.
With what he must have considered the solution to Solounias’s boredom, the stranger returned the next day to gift him with an Arabic copy of Zaidan’s The Girl of Ghassan.
“I had heard about him, but I never read a specific book by him,” Solounias, who has now worked in Edmonton as a reverend of the Canadian Orthodox Church for nearly 30 years, says of Zaidan. The majority of the Lebanese writer’s books were about Islamic culture and civilization. But in between, he wrote historical fiction.
“I fell in love with it,” Solounias says of the Arabic edition. “I said to myself, ‘I should really translate it.’”
And so he did. At last, replacing Solounias’s now-battered copy of Zaidan’s novel is his very own translated edition — in fact, it is the first time The Girl of Ghassan has appeared anywhere in English. Solounias hired One Cent Press, a local editing and tutoring company, to design and print the final product.
The Girl of Ghassan was first published in 1897, and, like much of Zaidan’s work, places fictional characters into real-world historical settings. The novel takes place in 629 AD in one of the last remaining Christian Arab tribes. The Ghassani people lived in what is now Syria, and operated under the rule of the Roman Empire. Alongside an imagined story of love, jealousy, and horse racing, we see how Islam — still led at the time by the Prophet Muhammad himself — actually began to spread across the Middle East.
For the most part, however, Christians and Muslims were still able to live together, side by side. That vision of religious tolerance is partly what inspired Solounias to bring the novel to readers in the 21st century.
“Because of the conflict in Middle East (today),” he says. “The bloodshed. The destruction. The poverty. The misery. You name it. I said to myself, ‘You know what? This novel might bring the people — especially the Arabic community — to understand that we can be one body, together, and respect and love one another.’
“Hopefully when people read this book, out of this chaos, (they remember) in that time, people were living in harmony. And peace.”
Solounias completed his translation in the mid-1970s, with some help from friends who had a better handle on English. (This is not the norm: typically, translators will translate into their stronger language.) But the typed manuscript was then forgotten for decades. In the meantime, Solounias stayed busy: he got ordained, was transferred to St. Philip’s Antiochian Church in Edmonton, then lived for a while in Montreal, came back, got married, and had a daughter. Today he has no official parish, but still volunteers with his community and serves as a freelance translator (Greek and Arabic) for the provincial government.
As Solounias told editor Linda Goyette in the anthology The Story that Brought Me Here, “I know (Edmonton) is where I truly belong.”
It wasn’t until 2007 that Solounias re-discovered the manuscript while cleaning out his basement. He thought it might be a good way of educating young people about the past, so he contacted the editor of Canadian Arab News, which is headquartered in Edmonton, and asked whether they would consider serializing The Girl of Ghassan on its pages. The editor agreed, and the first instalment ran on July 5 of that year.
“I received so many phone calls,” Solounias remembers, “from people who said, ‘Father, why don’t you publish it (as a book)?’ ” Finally, he gave in.
Copies of The Girl of Ghassan are currently available in the Chapters in West Edmonton Mall, as well as from One Cent Press’s website.